
Book ^\^ '^-^ "' 



UNDER THE SUN 




THE TASHI LAMA AT BUDDHGAYA. 



UNDER THE SUN 

IMPRESSIONS OF INDIAN QTIES; 
WITH A CHAPTER DEALING WITH 
THE LATER LIFE OF NANA SAHIB 



BY 
PERCEVAL LANDON 

AUTHOR OF "LHASA" 



" In Ynde ben fuUe manye dyverse Contrees." 

— Sir John Maundevilb, 



NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1907 

All rtphts resei-ved. 






OS ii^ 



1 



TO 

SIR FRANK YOUNGHUSBAND 



PREFACE. 

Upon the title-page I have placed Sir John's comment, 
which to this day remains the beginning and the end of 
all Indian knowledge. These chapters have been written 
in the course of annual wanderings over India during the 
last five years, and their intention is to indicate — if the 
unhappy phrase must be used — the widely different local 
colour that distinguishes one Indian city from another. 
*' Under the Sun " is not a record of the late tour of the 
Prince of Wales, nor is it in any sense a guide-book. But 
as a companion to that invaluable volume it may perhaps 
be of use to those who find a difficulty in making a picture 
out of the wealth of detailed Indian information which every 
traveller now possesses. There are also some tales. 

The chapter dealing with the hitherto unknown later 
days of Nana Sahib may seem somewhat out of keeping 
with the rest of the book. I am, however, confident that, 
on the contrary, these will prove to no few the most interest- 
ing pages in the volume, and my excuse for inserting them 
here must be that their small compass — which I did not 
wish to expand by adding in any way to the bald historical 
facts that are here presented for the first time — made their 
separate publication somewhat difficult. I owe thanks to 
many both in India and at home, and especially I wish to 
acknowledge the kindness of the proprietors of the Daily 
Telegraph, in whose columns I was enabled to sum up 
in a series of letters a part of what is here recast in a 
more permanent form. 

Perceval Landon. 

5, Pall Mall Place, S.W. 



CONTENTS 













page 


Preface vii 


Bombay .... 












I 


An Indian Railway Journey 












12 


Udaipur .... 












26 


Jaipur 












37 


Delhi 












49 


Lahore .... 












59 


The Khyber 












69 


Agra 












82 


Jammu 












92 


Calcutta .... 












lOI 


Darjiling .... 












. no 


PURI 












119 


Rangoon 












132 


Mandalay . . , . . 












144 


Madras .... 












154 


Cochin and Kottyam 












167 


Hyderabad .... 












• 179 


GWALIOR .... 












190 


Cawnpore .... 












198 


Amritsar .... 












209 


Bikanir .... 












. 222 


Benares ..... 










232 


Buddh-Gaya 










241 


South India .... 










258 


The Later Days of Nana Sahi 


B 










272 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



The Tashi Lama at Buddh-Gaya {coloured) . 
Malabar Point, Bombay , . . . 
A Bhairagi ...... 

The Elephants' Bathing Pool {photogravure) 

Chitor 

From the Palace : Udaipur .... 

Jag Mandar ...... 

Udaipur {photogravure') .... 

The Royal Palace, Udaipur 

On the Lake : Udaipur .... 

Amber Palace ...... 

A Corner of the Diwan-i-Khas 

Ahmedabad {photogravure) 

Kim on Zam-Zammah .... 

The Shalimar Gardens, Lahore . 

The End of the Grand Trunk Road, beyond 

Landi Kotal . . ... 

A Kafila in the Khyber Pass 

The Taj ( photogravure ) . . . . 

Jammu ....... 

Nadoun, Keeper of the Tigers, Jammu 

Sunrise on the Hugh {coloured ) . 

A Calcutta Sunset {photogravure) 

Sunset from the Fort, Calcutta {coloured ) . 

The Temple of Jaganath, Puri {photogravure) 

The Temple of Jaganath, Puri . 

A Burmese Monastery 

A Corner in a Monastery Compound 

The Shw^ Dagon 

Chitor ..... 

Mandalay ..... 

The Queen's Golden Monastery, Mandalay (/^t?/^- 

gravure) ..... 





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Xll 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Mahabalipuram {coloured) .... 

Hampi {photogravure) .... 

Siva's Temple at the Seven Pagodas {coloured ) 
Cochin Creek ...... 

A Woman of Travancore .... 

The Synagogue of the White Jews, Cochin . 
The Church, Kottyam .... 

Entrance to the Church, Kottyam 

Quilon {coloured) ..... 

Aurangzeb's Tomb, Roza . . . 
Golconda ....... 

Srirangam {photogravure) .... 

The Treasury Square, Amritsar . 

Sikh Devotees at Amritsar .... 

City Gate, Bikanir 

Gossips in Bikanir ..... 
Drawing Water : Bikanir .... 

A Street in Bikanir 

The Burning Ghat, Benares {photogravure) 
The only Temple to Brahma in India, on the 

shores of Pushkar Lake . 
The greatest Temple to Siva: the Golden 

Temple, Benares .... 

The largest Temple in India : view of Forbidden 

' Sanctuary of Vishnu's Temple, Srirangam 

The Lion Pillar recently found at Sarnath, near 

Benares ....... 

Buddh-Gaya . . ... 

Asoka's Railing, Buddh-Gaya 

The Great Buddha on the Diamond Throne 

Buddh-Gaya ..... 

Under the Bo-tree, Buddh-Gaya . 
Buddh-Gaya {coloured) 
The Old Dutch Fort, Quilon 
The Main Gateway, Tanjore 
Buddhist Cave Ellora {photogravure) 
A Sanctuary in Madura 
The Processional Car, Seringapatam . 
In a South Indian Temple. 
Rameswaram {photogravure) 



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UNDER THE SUN. 



Bombay. 

The fifth morning out from Aden raises India 
from the sea ahead, a grey wraith of jagged mountain 
spurs along the horizon to the east. Flat and ash- 
purple against the dawn, touched still with the last 
skeins of the vapours of the starry night, the hills 
stand sentinel about Bombay island and that all- 
precious inner harbour which nestles between the 
spit on which the city hes and the rugged main- 
land beyond. The ranges seem but a low-lying 
confusion at the first, but as they strain themselves 
apart, Salsette and Matheran and Khandala — 
thrones of mystery not unfit to form the back- 
ground of the entering-in of Asia — are to be distin- 
guished long before the first sight of Bombay itself 
is possible. There is another hour's steaming before 
the uttermost point of Malabar Hill, with its 

solitary casuarina and its rock-perched bungalow, 

I 



4 UNDER THE SUN. 

the conclusion of the whole matter. Bombay has 
little or no individuality. 

This is why so many a writer has tried to 
describe Bombay, and why so often the result 
is negative, though using half a lac of words. 
Simply, it cannot be done. She has no threads of 
continuity ; she has no point of reference, no 
inner meaning. First and foremost, she stands 
for a practical need that comes home equally 
to all those who occupy their business along the 
west coast of India — and she stands for little else. 
It would be easy to tell some scrap of the tale 
of the moving panorama in the streets ; it has 
been done, and well done, not once nor twice, 
nor thrice. Yet the glowing adjectives of a 
Chevrillon or a Steevens, or the quick and certain 
classification of an Arnold, will not, when all is 
said and done, give you more than one aspect 
of the great metropolis of the west. Jostling 
each other in the streets of the bazaar there are 
half the races of India. From hairy hill-men 
of the north-west, independent sons of Islam, 
wearing, despite their unkempt toilette, silk 
damasks and turquoise-studded belts of sambar- 
skin, bestitched and inlaid with colour, such as 
no other part of India can rival, to the six-sevenths 




I 



BOMBAY. 5 

naked bhistie, with his soiled loin-cloth dividing 
into three his sweating, burnt-sienna skin, you 
will find an example of almost every one of the 
main divisions of the inhabitants of India. But, 
if you look, you will find that these men are all 
strangers like yourself. Like you, a transitory 
necessity drives them into the Empire's gate ; 
but they have no home here, no abiding place, 
and, like you, as with a sigh you put on your sola 
topi once again, one and all are counting the days 
till they return homewards to plain, or coast, or 
mountain. All, that is, except the colourless and 
neutral residents of the bazaar, myriad hewers of 
wood and drawers of water to their vivid and 
attention-compelling guests, and except also the 
Parsees. 

Bombay has been made by the Parsees as much 
as by ourselves. The Huguenots of the East, 
they have acquired power and wealth in the 
land of their exile ; and their black-varnished 
scuttle hats, unbrimmed and ugly beyond even 
the top-hat of the West, are the fittest emblems 
of Bombay's unruffled commercial prosperity. 
The native name for them, " crows," is, in some 
ways, not unjust. They have reaped where others 
have sown. The merchant 'venturers of England 



6 UNDEk THE SUN. 

cleared their way for them, and if they have now 
reached the uttermost flood of their fortune, their 
future is not so much in doubt from any slackening 
of their keen business traits as from the restraint 
of marriage that their stringent code enjoins. 

The history of Bombay is half a romance, half 
a copy-book maxim.* They were shrewd men in 
the old days, who rented the dowry of the Infanta 
from Charles IL at ^fio a year " for ever." Against 
the assaults of the Admiral of Janjira and the 
Dutch alike, these imperial gamblers clung stub- 
bornly to their malarious spit of land between 
two waters, clung on through long and evil years, 
till their overbearing rival, Surat, was slowly silted 
up in the sands of the Tapti, and the impatient tide 
of commerce felt its way anew southward to its 
only other outlet. To-day their successors have 
reaped a reward indeed. Karachi is an overflow 
meeting rather than a rival attraction. Through 
Bombay the tides of men and merchandise must 
flow. But in its development Bombay has grown 
up in such manner as seaports must needs grow. 
Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta itself 
— ^all alike suffer this loss of identity beneath the 

* At one time Cromwell was far-sighted enough to think of capturing Bombay. 
There is a rumour that when he communicated his idea to them, his ministers had 
some idea that Bombay was near Brazil. 



BOMBAY, 7 

Cross-currents of commerce, that leveller of pre- 
judice and pride. It were as inept to quote the 
Queen's Road as characteristic of Bombay as the 
bazaar or the wooded gardens and villas of Malabar 
Hill. Elphinstone Circle, though a trifle out of 
date, has its own separate story to tell, and the 
dockyard, the Yacht Club, Mazagoon, and BycuUa 
each has its significance in this kaleidoscopic 
gallimaufry ; only the caves of Elephanta seem 
meaningless and forlorn. Elephanta, the imme- 
diate goal of the chance visitor to Bombay, scarcely 
exists for those who five here. The great rough- 
hewn statues still gaze out, but it is over an alien 
world. East and West have met on these islands, 
and the former is being driven reluctantly away 
to the mainland, of which, however, nothing will 
dispossess her. So reluctantly, indeed, that even 
now the two great hemispheres live side by side, 
and the East, at any rate, hardly sees the incon- 
sistency. Do you want a proof ? The great 
modern reservoirs of Malabar Hill are netted over 
lest gruesome morsels drop from the claws of the 
heavy-fiying vultures of the Towers of Silence. 
Nor is this all. Beside the pepals and palmettos 
of the curving shore the dull, heavy smell of burnt 
wood — ^and of some other burning thing as well — 



8 UNDER THE SUN. 

foists raw India upon the civilised senses of half- 
Europeanised Bombay, and the frock-coated native 
with a heavily-tinselled cap of velvet, who, with 
a kick, has just helped his dead father's soul to 
escape from the charred prison of the skull, climbs 
into a first-class carriage at Marine Lines Station, 
just across the way from the burning-ghat, un- 
conscious of any inconsistency. Nothing, indeed, 
is inconsistent in Bombay, except Elephanta, and 
she perhaps does not count. She has seen too 
much of too many peoples. 

Bombay lives fiercely from day to day, accepting 
all as grist that comes to her ever- turning temse. 
Her very architecture is restless and feverish. Who 
but those who live hectically in a kind of Asian 
Vanity Fair would have reared the strange piles of 
the Victoria Terminus and the Taj -Mahal Hotel ? 
These are the true emblems of Bombay. Despite 
her magnificence she is but a caravanserai and a 
starting-place, and you scarcely need to move off 
the white and blue floors of the gigantic rest-house 
on the Apollo Basin — shades of Arjumand, they 
are composed of mud and crockery chips ! — to know 
all that it imports to know of this roaring metro- 
polis and clearing-house of the commerce of five 
continents. Hither comes as much of the bazaar 




A Bhaiiagi. 



\_Facing page 8. 



BOMBAY. 9 

as you may believe is characteristic of Bombay. 
Here for a night or two all Anglo-India stays, 
drives out under the " Queen's Necklace," round 
the bay, eats its last of French cookery. Generals 
and subalterns, collectors, commissioners, Ameri- 
cans and clerks, globe-trotters, parsons, planters, 
men who remember, as of yesterday, the Ripon 
riots in Calcutta in 1883, men who, as young men, 
lined the road along which dead Mayo passed in 
state in 1873 — all come in their turn. But no one 
stays. The incoming and the outgoing tides surge 
and jostle in the cabined confines of the gate, and 
all alike are strangers in a strange city. 

Last year the Prince of Wales invested her with 
a transient importance, and with a population 
which taxed even her wide spaces to accommo- 
date, but when the splendid week had passed 
Bombay heard again as the dominant note of her 
existence only the thrumming mills and hoarse 
cries of the exchange and of the market, which 
had never ceased within her all the while. She is 
inscrutable. In some ways — and those not the 
best, perhaps — she needs insistent care and atten- 
tion. Her boasted title of the First of Indian 
Cities rings through the Indian Ocean, but here 
Death is always a near acquaintance, and plague 



10 UNDER THE SUN, 

and famine close companions. Here, too, the Up- 
washed vagrancy of the Arabian Sea is thrown 
ashore to mingle with the unballasted human trash 
of all races, with all the flotsam and jetsam that 
silts downwards to a congenial Smyrna in a farther 
Levant. If you seek for romance in Bombay 
you must seek it among those who cannot get away 
from her ; you must demand it of the Thagi and 
Dacoity department or of the slum missionary. 

You may find someone to tell you that strange 
tale of how, not many years ago, an earnest young 
police official caused to be arrested an aged 
mendicant, whose bodily marks corresponded with 
those of one who had been " wanted " by Govern- 
ment for forty years. He wired to Simla. Wise, 
entirely wise, the Viceroy " cleared the line " and 
made the telegraph wires hot in the urgency of his 
counter-order, ** Release at once." Now the man — 
so he said, and so the police believed — was no other 
than Nana Sahib himself. True or false, it is not 
uncharacteristic of the place that that dark and 
restless soul, hounded from place to place, seeking 
friends, adherents, believers, and finding none 
from Tibet to Satara, should at last be drawn 
inevitably into the tortuous currents of Bombay, 
where, as in London, a man may hide himself 



BOMBAY. II 

beyond all search, and it was akin to Bombay that 
here of all places in the East the last transitory 
glimpse may have been caught, as a diseased and 
beggared outcast, of the infamous figure of the last 
century. Herein alone is Bombay's romantic side. 
Of history and pageant she has little, and to-day 
she is as free from sentiment as the notices in the 
halls of her hotels. She has her own business to do, 
and she has no time to waste. She builds hugely, 
because it is convenient to transact business in 
ample of&ces. But she waters the streets and plants 
trees with coloured leaves for the same reason 
as that for which she accumulates meaningless 
finials, unnecessary balustrades, silly rosettes, and 
gratuitous cusps on the outside of her buildings, 
and paints their insides with fearsome pre- Victorian 
patterns and glazes their windows with large 
lozenges of green and yellow and red glass. Some- 
one has told her it is right to do these things, and 
she has done them, only too glad to shift to others 
the responsibility. But after her own interests she 
looks well enough, and there is not a port in the 
East, perhaps not a port in the West either, whose 
prosperity is founded on such stable foundations as 
those which the scanty subsoil of this overcrowded 
island-spit supplies. 



12 



An Indian Railway Journey. 



One goes so slowly on an Indian line and, on 
the whole, so easily, that one can watch the pass- 
ing landscape as comfortably as from a stage- 
coach. And there is always something to see. 
Early in the first cool dawn you may raise your- 
self on one elbow to look out across the purple 
earth to where the first dull crimson and gold is 
gathering in the East, but even then you will never 
be early enough to have anticipated the day's 
labour. The European conception of the Oriental 
as an easy-going and indolent man, content to get 
his work done with the least possible exertion to 
himself, is only a half truth. It is founded on the 
fact that the Englishman in India, to a great extent, 
still keeps to his home hours of work and rest, 
and, therefore, is busiest and most abroad when 
the Asiatic rests, and is asleep or indoors during 
the long cool dark hours, when Indian work in 
field and city alike is being done. The work in 



AN INDIAN RAILWAY JOURNEY. 13 

the fields may not be hard, but it is day-long and 
year-long ; even the children do their little share 
from morning to night. Here, in a little plot 
of millet, bald of even a stalk in places, and 
stunted from end to end, is a crazy machan or 
bird-scarer's perch, like a stork's nest on four 
bamboo supports, whereon crouches a seven-year- 
old boy beneath the scanty shade of a ragged 
piece of soiled cloth. He has no rattle, but he 
cries out shrilly as a flight of felon birds swoops 
down with the orderly flight of telegraph wires on 
his charge. A small store of stones he employs 
shrewdly, and to his youthful mind the goose and 
the peacock have no sacrosanctity above an in- 
quisitive pair of mynas or a flight of hungry linnets. 
The train itself helps him not at all. In a sur- 
prisingly short time the birds and beasts of India 
have come to accept the train as a noisy but good- 
natured kind of elephant, that never looks either 
to his right or to his left or leaves the beaten track. 
Even the palpitating lizards do but flick them- 
selves a yard or two from the thundering flanges. 

Between the railway line itself and the wire 
fencing there generally is a no-man's land of grey, 
unfertile soil, a gritty slope on which the ak 
plant flourishes. This is your veritable emblem 



14 UNDER THE SUN. 

of India. With its thick glaucous leaves^ its stalk- 
clinging white and purple blossoms, it grows as 
luxuriantly at Landi Kotal as at Palk Straits. No 
desert soil is too dry, no rock cleft too poor, to 
nourish this curious shrub ; there is not a poorly- 
developed specimen, not even a dried or browned 
leaf of the ak from one end of India to the other. 
Go up to a plant in the most torrid stretch of water- 
less stone and sand in the peninsula, in such a place 
that nothing else — not even the white-flowered 
" gos," its nearest rival — can survive, and snap a 
stem between your fingers. Instantly there is an 
outrush of white viscous fluid ; the very leaves are 
milky reservoirs as well. You had better not rub 
your eyes with your fingers afterwards. It is one of 
the inexplicable freaks of Nature, and were it less 
common, would be cultivated under a Latin name 
in hothouses at home. For it is a handsome plant, 
though, unhonoured and unsung, it remains the 
pariah flower of India. Rubber can be made 
of this ak juice. But a commercial expert once 
gravely explained to me that the reason why there 
were not likely to be great results from its em- 
ployment for this purpose, was that the resultant 
rubber was totally inelastic. 

Ha.r(J by, if the ground be poor enough, will 



AN INDIAN RAILWAY JOURNEY. 15 

be the handsome datura, with its large white 
trumpets amid the strongly-cut deep green foliage. 
It is a fine weed, and, like the yellow turwar 
yonder, prefers ruins and dead soils to thrive 
among. But an ineradicable habit of the Indian 
peasantry renders it unpopular. They cunningly 
extract from it a simple and efficacious poison, and 
any Assistant-Commissioner will confess that the 
" snake-bite " returns of his district are often 
swollen out of recognition by the victims of the 
datura. Beyond this little strip of desert the 
interest of the land begins. 

While still near Bombay, travel in India will 
seem cast in pleasant and fertile spots. Beneath 
Salsette and by Kalyan the deep-fringed bananas 
and feathering cocoanuts rise from such ponds as 
are illustrated in the geography books of the nur- 
sery, and the rich avenues of shisham that shade 
the village streets sweep past with a dignity that is 
almost English. The crops of maize are six feet 
high, and the whole face of the country seems 
sopping with excess of rain. But the reversing 
stations near Igatpuri will put a sudden end to the 
rich promise of the western slopes of the Ghauts. 
East of these historic mountains the drought of 
last year is apparent. One canno^ ponder that a 



i6 UNDER THE SUN. 

dry season means death for thousands here. Out 
to the very horizon the dry, wasted plains of India, 
seamed with arid water-courses, stretch ; to the 
visitor the lack of fertility will seem to change but 
little from end to end of the sub-continent, except in 
those districts which are fed by the gigantic water 
distributions of man's making. A wheeling vision of 
dust and drought is in most years the prevailing sight. 
The scene from an Indian railway carriage 
window may include almost everything that is 
most characteristic in the Empire, the tortured 
waste of waterless nullahs by the Chambal— the 
fleeting vision of the pearl-Hke Taj across the 
river, with which the East Indian Railway closes 
its long mileage into Agra — the " karroo " of 
Bikanir — the green tropical vegetation of the Dar- 
jiling Railway, crowned by the Himalayan snows — 
the lush, rank jungle of Madras — 'the iron thun- 
derings across the sand-bordered trickles that at 
this season represent the five rivers of the north- 
west — the waterfalls and ferns of the Khandala 
gradients — the grinding curves and everlasting 
smoke-bound tunnels of the Simla Railway, and 
a hundred other scenes, all true and transient 
pictures of different sides of Indian life, are there 
for him to see; but the vision that he and most 



AN INDIAN RAILWAY JOURNEY. 17 

Indian travellers will remember best is none of 
these. It is such a scene as one has seen ten 
hundred times, the dusty road crossing the track 
beneath the dusty bebel tree on the one side, and 
the dusty " padwan " on the other. A single iron 
rail across it checks a little party, who stare as 
the train goes by — a woman drawing her sari's 
edge across her lips, while she holds in upon her 
hips her naked child astraddle ; perhaps an older 
child running up and waving a welcome to the 
carriages, and a man attending to one of the two 
bullocks lest it swerve. Perhaps a pad-footed camel, 
heavily laden on either side with packs of coarse 
sacking ; perhaps a ruth or zenana bullock-cart, 
closely veiled against both curiosity and the sun. 
On the dipping telegraph-wires a green parakeet 
and a flash of white feathers, as two mynas tumble 
upon the dusty ground with a spread of wings — 
the eternal whine of a Persian water-wheel, that can 
hardly be seen under the shade of a dusty banyan 
across an allotment of dry plough-marks. The sun 
beats down fiercely upon the scene, and the bullocks 
blink theix fly-ringed eyes in the glare, and the 
drifting red dust floats from under our wheels upon 
them all as we watch and go by. A cactus hedge, 
like a hne of escaped sea monsters, holds up its green 



i8 UNDER THE SUN. 

claws and bat-like hands, all unnaturally blossomed 
at the edge with yellow flowers, and the raw smell 
of acacia wood comes from a Httle fire beside the 
stone posts of the railway fencing. The man who 
is cooking there does not deign even to turn his 
head over his shoulder to see us pass. The picture 
is gone as soon as it has come, and the dull succes- 
sion of dry red fields, surface-scratched and bare, 
succeeds again, broken only by a rare village, or 
the muddy stagnant pool in which a water buffalo 
wallows, his nostrils alone standing out above the 
scum of the water. And then every two or three 
hours the crowded and confused panorama of a 
great railway station, the huddled multitudes lying 
like dim sheep at night, and pressing and shouting 
like another Babel all the day ; the long-drawn cries 
of " Pan bheree-e-e " from the platform hucksters 
hurrying up and down, the strange meetings over 
a hasty meal at wayside stations of men from 
Seistan or Mogok, the curious knowledge of obscure 
junction villages, where half a day has to be wasted 
before a train comes in. Well do I remember one 
such occasion. 

Between Raichur and Adoni the combings of 
the rake of Allah have been swept together into 
heaps and ranges of bare rock and sun-baked hills 



AN INDIAN RAILWAY JOURNEY. 19 

of blackened lumber. It is a bare country. Aloe 
hedges shut in both sides of the Hne, their tall 
flowers seeming by their very shape to mock the 
telegraph poles beside them. Yellow mimosas^ 
or bebel thorns, flourish in the dry soil, and where 
there is a patch of moisture spiky palmettos and 
cocoanuts spring ; maize grows poorly in such 
places, too, and you will sometimes see a string 
of child-herded buffaloes slowly passing along for 
their evening mud-bath outside the village. That 
is all, and of all the dreary stations in this land 
Wadi is the dreariest. It is in Hyderabad and a 
junction with the line owned by the Nizam. It also 
has a refreshment room, wherein one dines on the 
way between Madras and Bombay. But conceive 
it ! There is a blistering length of platform set 
between the glittering silver of the railway lines — 
(nothing ever rusts here). The station consists of 
the few necessary official rooms, and, if I remember, 
there is a corrugated iron roof, and there is a big 
water-tank, upborne by iron pillars, for the use 
of the engines. There is a triple dripping water- 
carrier for the use of the natives, and a bougain- 
villea blazes insolently with its crude hot magenta 
against the wide desert sky All round the wilder- 
ness lies hot and empty. To the west there are half 



2D UNDER THE SUR 

a dozen raiiishackle houses of mud in which the 
railway workmen have to hve. 

Some years ago I spent a day there.. Coming 
up from Hampij I had to join the train that ran 
through Wadi somewhere about midnight. I shall 
never forget that day. One hour seemed like six. 
There was absolutely no single thing to do from one 
minute to the next. I had no book. There was 
nothing to shoot, there was nothing to sketch. 
The heat sweltered along the empty station, and 
every now and again great " boofs " of searingly hot 
air stirred the leaf -flowers of the bougainvillea. 
The shadow of the overhead roof made the heat 
just tolerable. One could not put one's hand 
upon anything an inch beyond its sharply-cut 
purple shadow. The sixth telegraph pole north 
and south crawled with the mirage. I went to 
see the station-master. " Do they keep you long 
here ? " I asked. 

" Not very. I am asking for an exchange at 
once, though." 

" You surprise me," I said grimly. 

" I want it," he said, " for two reasons. One," 
he went on, " you can imagine for yourself," and he 
shrugged his arms out while a hotter blast than 
usual stirred along the platform. " The other," 



AN INDIAN RAILWAY JOURNEY. 21 

said he, crossing his legs, " is different. Things 
got so monotonous here that a little time ago 
I thought Fd have a joke. So I wrote an account 
of a cricket match played here between the 
Wadi Junction eleven and a visiting team from 
Adoni." 

I looked at him. Cricket teams at Wadi. Mark 
Tapley could scarcely have done better. 

" Yes/' he went on ruminatively, " I did the 
whole thing well. I was modest about myself too, 
and I sent it to the newspapers, and they all printed 
it. Well, after that, I had these cricket matches 
once a week, and after a bit I gave the averages of 
the team. But I did not reckon upon one thing. 
Thanks. The sporting editor of some Bombay 
paper began talking of the ' hitherto untapped re- 
sources of this well-known sporting centre,' and he 
suggested that the gentleman at the head of the 
bowling averages should be given a chance for — 
what do you suppose ? — the presidency match. 
It is forty miles to their boundary. Well," he said, 
** what was I to do ? A letter came in asking 
whether it were possible for this bowler to get away 
for a day or two for some trial match. That I stopped 
all right," he continued. ** I wrote officially as my- 
self to say that he could not be spared, but it left 



22 UNDER THE SUN. 

me in a hole. I could not very well stop sending 
the reports in, so I determined to reduce his 
form. That is not so easy, you know, with a 
bowler." 

" But it was no use. The thing had spread," 
he went on, " and I got other letters, challenges, 
special terms offered for cricketing outfits, and, 
worst of all, a man has just written to me, and 
says that he has started on a round of cricketing 
visits during his holiday, and asks if I can put him 
up at the club here. Club ! " repeated the station- 
master, with a withering accent of sarcasm. *' And 
he would like a day or two's play with our well- 
known local team. He is due here in about ten 
days. Of course it is not so much that he will 
expose my httle fun, but the poor devil has pro- 
bably arranged his tour, and will have lost two or 
three days somewhere else. That," concluded the 
station-master, " is why I want to go away." 

I had no solution to suggest. 

" A curious thing," went on the station-master— 
" how easily you can take in people who flatter 
themselves they know India. Why, every soul 
in the offices of the West Coast Clarion must pass 
through this blighted hole half a dozen times a 
year, yet they swallowed my cricket stories with- 



AN INDIAN RAILWAY JOURNEY. 23 

out turning a hair. Gad ! " he added, " I'd like 
to have 'em down here for a week. Club, indeed ! " 

We looked out over the empty bald bare grit of 
the South Indian desert plateau. Forty miles 
away there was a blue Une of hills. Between them 
and us there was absolutely no single thing to 
break the quivering horizon line. If we had looked 
on the other side of the station we should have 
seen the same thing. Conversation flagged. Even 
the refreshment room was shut up between train 
times, probably to save from inebriety the prisoner- 
passengers of Wadi. Merely to break the mono- 
tony I walked out along the line in the sun. A few 
lizards flicked anxiously into crannies in the baked 
earth. That was all the movement in the land- 
scape, except the effervescence of the mirage. 
There was the peace of Hades over everything. 
I went back to the deserted patch of purple shadow 
under the iron roof, and immediately the least 
expected thing in the world happened. 

The station-master, watching a far distant- 
crawling speck, said, " That's a special." And 
some time after up to the station there came a 
train, carrying a travelling circus and menagerie. 
Nine-feet elephants looked plaintively over the 
tops of the trucks, Panthers and ounces growled 



24 UNDER THE SUN. 

behind bars. Horses, pie-bald and skew-bald, 
whinnied in their boxes, and a flight of graceful 
white-and-tan collies were loosed from a truck on 
to the platform. It was the quaintest sight you 
might imagine, and after the nice beasts there 
descended upon the platform the European men 
and women of the show. The men were in shirt- 
sleeves, dirty — oh, very dirty ! — collars, slippers, and 
a two-day growth of beard. They had perhaps not 
washed for more than two days. Their language 
was unpleasant, their habits were similar. The 
ladies of the troupe — but no ! They all made at 
once for the refreshment room. It was a relief 
to go back to the beasts, and I ask you whether there 
ever was such a contrast as that between the aching, 
empty levels of the deserted Wadi desert and these 
specimens of Western civilisation. There was a 
great bronzed Sikh on the platform, when, after 
disputing the bill with such expletive energy that 
the Babu in charge of the refreshment room gave 
up the struggle, these representatives of the Sahib- 
log came out again on to the plaftorm, and one 
by one challenged comparison with the clean-cut, 
aristocratic features of this " nigger " — as they 
called him. I felt inclined to go up and apologise 
to the Sikh. But I forbore. I remembered another 



AN INDIAN RAILWAY JOURNEY. 25 

occasion^ many hundred miles away, when the 
last touch was put to an incident^ which reflected 
little credit upon a few Englishmen, by the respectful 
sympathy which an austere, hook-nosed Pathan 
rissaldar expressed with the humiliation which 
his own clean-cut, resourceful white officer must 
then be feeling. In a few minutes the train re- 
started, and the travelling company rumbled off 
across the waste. I wish they had left one of the 
collies behind them. In ten minutes the desert 
had resumed its barren solemnity, and the sta- 
tion-master said, " Talking about that cricket 
team ' ' 



26 



Udaipur. 



Elsewhere in Indian India there is magnificence 
enough of human construction. Vast fortresses there 
are, and jewelled suites of women's apartments, 
the pomp of isolated tower or crowded audience 
chamber, the ostentatious piety of marble mosque 
and gilt-roofed temple, or the homes of that grim 
and austere faith which was content to burrow out 
dark Cyclopean halls in the living rock, and worship 
three hundred feet below the grasses wilting in the 
sunshine on the mountain side. But alone at 
Udaipur is there in its perfection the fairy palace 
of one's childhood, just such a long cataract of 
marble terraces and halls falling into the waters of 
a mountain-encircled lake, as the illustrator of an 
Andrew Lang fairy book delights to draw. 

It is an old story that Viceroy after Viceroy has 
come to Udaipur revolving in his mind schemes for 
bringing this lonely capital to date, and devising 
methods for the utilisation of Udaipur's natural 




Chitor. 



[Facing page 26. 



UDAIPUR. 27 

advantages of wood and water. Viceroy after 
Viceroy from Simla or Calcutta had expressed a 
hope that those modern improvements which have 
been adopted to their vast material benefit by other 
States might find a home here also. But Viceroy 
after Viceroy has gone back from Udaipur well 
content to leave her as she is, unspoiled and un- 
improved, recognising that dynamo and driving 
band are poor substitutes for the splendid pattern 
of old-world chivalry and courteous tradition which 
this lovely lake-side palace sets, not to Mewar and 
Rajputana only, of which the Maharana is the un- 
disputed overlord, but to all India alike. The lord 
of all these white marbles, blue waters, and attendant 
hills has no equal in our empire. It is true that the 
State of Mewar, over which he rules, is neither the 
largest nor the richest even among his kith and kin 
of Rajputana : strategically Udaipur is a back- 
water ; moreover, it contains no such holy spots 
as half a dozen other principalities may claim ; it 
is only within the last ten years that a railway has 
enabled a traveller to visit it in comparative com- 
fort ; the Government of India has never been 
caused a pang of anxiety by anything that has ever 
taken place within the borders of the State. Yet 
Udaipur stands alone and unrivalled in India by 



28 UNDER THE SUN. 

virtue of India's most characteristic and iron-bound 
law. Were free election to be made to-morrow 
among the native competitors for the kingship of 
India, no one would dare to stand against the 
Maharana of Udaipur. Islam might gnash its 
teeth, but the odds are great, and the Pathans 
are but an unstable foundation for an empire. For 
Udaipur is the two hundred-and-fortieth descendant 
in right line from the Sun, and primate and pontifex 
secular among all who hold the Hindu faith. From 
a hundred walls looks down the Rana's emblem 
— gules, the Sun in his splendour, or. Timidly do 
even the haughtiest claim kinship with him. Once 
upon a time the great Jang Bahadur sent down 
twenty-seven thousand maunds of grain to the 
relief of his famine-stricken " cousins " in Raj- 
putana. The word ** cousin " is vague enough in 
Hindostan, and the gift was accepted. Had the 
Maharana known that Nepal was on the strength 
of this kinship daring to use his celestial insignia, 
the tribute would have been rejected as an insult, 
for even the difference between the sun and the 
moon is not as great as that between " suraj " 
and " chandar " in this genealogy. 

But Udaipur would remain princess among the 
cities of India were it but a bania or a sweeper 





From the Palace : L'daipur. 




[Facing page 28. 



UDAIPUR. 29 

caste which reigned beside the Pichola lake. Walls, 
indeed, and a grim bastioned gateway or two, a 
vast and blood-stained record of gallantry, and a 
warlike tradition — that still finds its echo in the 
tulwar which every man carries in his hand to this 
day, even though he doubles it up with an umbrella 
— all these are here, and at Chitor, yet Udaipur 
remains dainty and feminine, as no other city is in 
hither or farther India. She is approached wearily. 
Even now the train from Chitorgarh labours along 
the bare, rising plains of Rajputana, with a heat and 
a dust and a tardiness which are no unfit substi- 
tutes for those brambles and spines which of old 
have always beset the palace of a sleeping princess. 
Few turn aside from the beaten track of India's 
indicated sights to visit remote Udaipur — yet 
Udaipur is worth many another tourist resort. 
She lies remote and unhackneyed, hedged about 
with plains above plains, in which the only colour 
is that of a jay's wing or of a blue convolvulus 
draping a dead thorn bush ; all else is grey, dun, 
rusty, and clogged, save the cactus hedges that 
stand up between plot and plot too straight and 
smooth to catch the trailing dust as deeply as the 
other vegetation. But at last the railway station, 
respectfully distant from the city walls, is reached. 



30 UNDER THE SUN. 

and, after a couple of miles along the road, the 

dak bungalow beside the walls also. 

There are many things that are worth a visit in 
Udaipur, but the lake is the first and final attraction. 
It is almost a pity to go over the palace. Nothing 
could ever come up to the exquisite suggestion of 
its outside, and that, because its landward side is 
choked with mean houses, is only to be well seen 
from the island-dotted waters of Pichola. Of these 
islands Jag Mandar and Jag Newas are the most 
important. Both are almost entirely covered with 
white marble summer palaces, over which a few tall 
palms and vivid bananas lift themselves from the 
cloistered gardens inside. From either there is to be 
had a view of the Sun-child's palace which explains 
the attention and lavish expense which they have 
enjoyed at the hands of the children of Mewar. 
There is a terrace on Jag Mandar — just above the 
steps upon which the clear water dances trans- 
parently and the alligators sometimes come — from 
which the huge building is seen at its best. Tier 
above tier the snowy walls and terraces rise from 
the very ripples of the lake, where under the kiss 
of the wind their reflection makes a matted tangle 
of white. Here and there the whiteness of the half- 
translucent architecture is relieved by a touch of 




■««, 
jp 



UDAIPUR. 31 

green where a banyan or a group of acacias rises 
from a walled-in garden-plot, but the same quick 
white, of half a hundred shades and values, argent 
in the sun and veiled-blue in the shadows, spreads 
along the palace wall or points itself into the dome 
and pinnacle of the roof, till the upper line cuts 
the blue of the air, white from end to end of the 
thousand feet of the palace sky-line, save and 
except just where, at one end, an audacious and 
flaring bougainvillea leans in lambent magenta 
and dark olive-green over the topmost and most 
secluded court of all — white, white, and, from 
end to end, white. 

You will be rowed along the river frontage, and 
your cicerone — whom you must have with you, as 
the privilege of roving about on Pichola is subject 
to a special permit and to this disability — will try 
and make you land at Jag Newas, the second of these 
islet palaces. But you will be wise to refuse. Let 
your boatmen rather row you past Nao and Lai 
ghats, bathing steps that lie northward to the dam. 
Here, in irregular echelons — broken by gravelled 
slopes, like Arjankura, down which the patient oxen 
come all day with the bhisties to have their leather 
water-skins filled ; by the uncompromising square 
pipal-overhung terrace of a temple, from which an 



32 UNDER THE SUN. 

everlasting drum bangs, and the threshold is spotted 
with orange marigolds ; by the blank wall of some 
Royal prince's residence — the marble steps which 
the bathers and the washers use, stretch out and 
stretch on for half a mile. Close under the King's 
Palace is the first of them, Pipli, hard by the moor- 
ings of the triple-storey ed State barges. The men 
bathe stolidly and alone, each one absorbed in 
attention to ritual. It is a religious duty with 
them, a matter to be carried out with exactitude 
and scruple, and a man will not notice you as you 
come near upon the water. The women chatter 
much in groups and wash clothes betimes ; what 
with the clothes they have cast off and those that 
lie a-drying on the upper steps, they make up a 
rich picture in the morning shade beneath the 
temple walls. The children enjoy themselves alone 
and spatter and squeal and choke in the shallows. 
Across the way, by Hanuman's ghat, a cormorant 
sits expectant on a half-submerged post, and at its 
feet a heavy tortoise of a hundred and fifty pounds 
slowly turns over at water-level. 

I remember a time when the Pichola Lake pre- 
sented a different sight indeed. Beautiful as 
Udaipur is at any hour, and in any season, there is 
a well-remembered tradition, that when a Viceroy 




UiJAIFUR . 



UDAIPUR. 33 

or member of the Imperial house visits her, the 
town and lake-front, forts, bridges, ghats, islands, 
and terraces shall all, that night, be outlined with 
fire. 

It is easy to waste adjectives on such a sight, 
but, in sober truth, there cannot be, there can 
never have been elsewhere in the world, such a 
spectacle as the Pichola Lake presents when its 
quick surface reflects the quiet lights which trace in 
points of fire, the steps and string courses, lintels, 
jambs, roofs, domes, cupolas, and arched cloisters 
of four miles of architecture. There is much, per- 
haps, to be said against the custom. Next morning, 
remember, Udaipur lies out bedraggled and soiled 
with a million smoky patches on her snow-white 
walls, the waters of the lake are grey with soot 
and iridescent with spilled oil, and the lovely island 
palaces are defiled with smoked patches along 
every sill and string-course. Still, there must have 
been an ugly aftermath even in the most splendid 
days of Florentine or Roman festivals, and at 
the time the beauty of these persistent lines of 
light, daintily ruffled by the quiet night airs, is 
beyond words. Later on, in the evening after 
the Maharana's state dinner is over, when above 
the dots of fire^the shearing rockets curve and bear 

3 



34 UNDER THE SUN. 

coloured fruits in mid-heaven, and huge set-pieces, 
half-smothered and wholly improved by bulging 
volumes of amber smoke, crackle out in indistin- 
guishable figures and lay coloured pathways over 
the rippling waters, the brilliancy and barbarism of 
the gorgeous sight seems the one finale needed to 
round off the faery perfection of Udaipur. 

But on such a night, though beyond question 
barbaric in Oriental splendour, one touch of genius, 
sheer genius, saves the whole glittering scene from 
that colour of ostentation that might have been 
feared. There, where the mighty mass of the 
Maharana's palace rises sheer above the lake, there 
where most display would be expected, not a spark 
glitters except a single row of lights, marking the 
parapet line of the central block, rising square two 
hundred and fifty feet out of the water. All else 
is dark, and one rather feels the great palace to be 
there than knows it, though at its foot low festoons 
of lamps light red-carpeted stairs down to the water, 
which all day have been a solitary splash of crim- 
son on the vast white building. 

But on other days of sunshine take a word of 
advice. Life is good enough on the water. Nothing 
on the land is quite worth the trouble of going to 
see, not even the famous pig-feeding at the end of 




The Royal Palace, Udaipur. 



[Facing iage 34. 



UDAIPUR. 35 

the lake. Not a room in the main Palace or in the 
water pavihons in the lake is worth it. Within 
this exquisite dream of fresh white marble are 
rooms that must be seen to be believed. I have no 
hesitation in saying that one room is without rival 
on earth for the eye-searing taste displayed in it. 
It is about forty feet by twenty, and from the walls 
project low pillars and rough-edged plaster arches. 
The whole of the walls and arches is mustard yellow 
distemper. There is a deep frieze of atrocious 
German " della Robbia " plaques. The pillars are 
of the same material, each one a tub-like achieve- 
ment of the Fatherland. From the centre of the 
ceiling, over a round table draped with chenille, 
descends a chandelier of strange form, vast and 
clumsy. All the glass thereon is petunia-coloured 
and engraved with " scenes." The furniture, of 
a pre-Victorian gilt description, is upholstered 
in frayed magenta silk brocade. But the springs 
are coming through, and it will be necessary to 
re-cover at least the settee soon — one wonders what 
colour will be selected. It is a good rule never to 
visit the modernised rooms of an Oriental palace, 
but Udaipur — Udaipur, " last, loneliest, loveliest, 
exquisite, apart " — is perhaps, in this respect, the 
very worst example that can be found. 

3* 



36 UNDER THE SUN. 

One turns in towards the Pipli Ghat again, and 
as one passes idly beneath the pipal that overhangs 
the bank, a flight of seven pigeons dashes out across 
the surface of the water to the sunset, piercing the 
thick leaves like a salvo of round shot, and my lord 
the elephant, under his crazy thatch of long grasses, 
takes off and eats the turban of matted fodder that 
has served him all day as a sun-bonnet. The walls 
of the palace change colour from lemon-yellow 
through orange to a faint rose, and thence through 
amethyst to a dull dead-leaden white, as the last 
hues die out of the sky. One has to find one's way 
home through the royally luxurious Durbar gardens, 
past the open-air wheelwright's establishment, past 
the tortuous and crowded lanes of gallantly-painted 
houses and crazy shops, till we make the great gate- 
way, and emerge into the cold, clear evening air, 
and see the massive bastions and battlements of 
Sasnisargarh beyond the scanty lights of the dak 
bungalow. 







On the Lake : Udaipur. 



IFacmg page 36. 



37 



Jaipur. 



You cannot imagine for yourselves the capital 
of Rajputana unless you bring visibly before the 
eye of the mind that city which, by order of 
Suleiman-ben-Daoud, was carried bodily away by 
J inns, and planted as it stood in the midst of the 
desert. North, south, and east, the high scarps of 
the protecting mountain ranges rise fair and steep, 
fortified with creeping lines of masonry ; but the 
wide waste of sand which stretches out westward 
lies hidden behind them also — merciless, unsym- 
pathising, encroaching. The City of Victory offers 
a vain and doomed resistance. Five miles away, 
among the mountains to the north. Amber, the old 
city, waits, patient and ruined, for the day to come 
when the long-delayed tide of desert sand shall sweep 
round into the recess where Jaipur hides, and the 
dainty gardens and wide pink-washed streets of 
balconied and latticed houses shall at last become 
part and parcel of the great Indian desert. Even 



38 UNDER THE SUN. 

now the long levels stretch interminably, dry and 
arid, choked with drifted heaps of grit where a fold 
in the ground or a scorched boulder has arrested 
the ever-running skein of wind-blown sand, and 
seamed with the thirsty nullahs where no plant 
blows. Only a few bebel thorns find beside the 
track a scanty catchment of water in the hollows 
dug out to provide embankment for the fiery rails, 
and low clouds of the loose-petalled wild cassia 
alternates a pungent yellow with the faint lilac and 
grey-green of the inevitable ak plant. 

Inside a sheltered nook in the mountains of 
Rajputana, where the bare spurs of the Amber 
ridge thrust out huge sand groynes into the wilder- 
ness, Jai Singh built him his new home and set 
it about with wide and metalled roads and orderly 
squares, and all the green comfort of a garden town. 
From a distance Jaipur lies hidden amid its own 
foliage. Only here and there the high bastions of 
the city gates, the dainty finials and cupolas of 
the palace or of Jacob's Museum, or the curving 
edges of a flame-like temple tower, rise high over 
the sea of banyan and neem and straggling acacia. 
But year by year the vanguard of the desert creeps 
up from the south-west nearer and nearer into the 
very mouth of this haven of refuge. For Jaipur 



JAIPUR. 39 

lies unprotected and assailable from just that one 
quarter from which the danger comes. Her green- 
robed squares and avenues, the compounds which 
surround her houses, her gardens and her gallant 
walks, spotting and slashing the sea of stone and 
tile and mortar, are only a real mirage. The 
Maharaja is but playing the game that Mrs. Par- 
tington once played, and the ocean of the desert 
will some day win to the foot of the hills, and the 
broad town of green and ochre and pink will be 
as Tadmor. Even now the first ripples of that tide 
are seen in the twelve-foot bridle-track of four-inch 
dust with which the roads are fringed upon the 
right hand and upon the left ; already the very 
palace courts are scenes of miniature cyclones, 
and the sills of the wayside temple gates are banked 
up flush with a ramp of white dust. The very 
trees that look so well from the heights above, drive 
their hard-pressed roots through dust only to 
deeper dust, and so, perhaps, to some low stratum 
where they may suck some scanty moisture still 
left from last season's rains. In the public gardens, 
the flowers rise from thick layers and blankets of 
the soft and silky powdering, and there is not a 
leaf or a blade of grass from end to end of the city 
which is not permanently fringed and coated with 



40 UNDER THE SUN. 

the white threat of the oncoming wilderness with- 
out. Always the veil^ thinner now and then 
again thicker, hangs in the air twelve feet high ; 
once or twice a day a dust-storm drives a stinging 
haze of particles which penetrate like a smell 
through the very walls and windows of the house. 
Up on the deserted hills, Amber still resists the 
subtle teeth of age and neglect. Indeed, were a 
palace all that is needed, the Maharaja of Jaipur 
might transfer himself to his old capital with as 
little delay as attends the flitting of the Viceroy 
from Calcutta to Simla year by year. All is here 
still — the courts of audience and the gardens of 
repose, the women's apartments and the long 
galleries for the men and beasts. Even to this 
day the temple is served as diligently as ever, 
and the early visitor to Amber may still see the 
morning sacrifice to Kali hustled into the sacred 
domain — a goat, dyed blue upon its head and 
neck, and vaguely resisting the efforts of the 
priest's acolytes to shepherd him in these un- 
wonted paths. Excepting always the Imperial 
palaces of India, there is not in the peninsula a 
more exquisite structure of marble inlaid with 
precious and semi-precious stones, of sandal-wood 
inlaid with ebony and ivory, than this deserted 




ViKi^, 



t h . U $» ^ ^- 





Amber Palace. 



l^Fachig page 40. 



JAIPUR. 41 

home of long dead and forgotten chieftains. Indeed, 
the story goes that Jehangir himself, the pettiest 
of soul of all the Mogul Emperors, sent peremptory 
orders that his vassal's beautiful home should be 
pulled down, as being more beautiful than his 
own. But his emissary arrived at Amber only to 
find the exquisite carvings of pillar and corbel and 
bracket plastered and overlaid with an inch-thick 
coat of rough cement and whitewash, and he could 
only return and report with amazement to his 
Imperial master that rumour had strangely exag- 
gerated the beauties of Mirza Raja's new palace. 
Amber city needs far more concern. At a distance its 
streets and walls seem fairly stout though roofless, 
but a hundred and eighty years of neglect have 
worked far more havoc in poorer homes of sun-dried 
brick and loose stone than in the marble and sand- 
stone palace. Everywhere the indefatigable acacia 
has rooted itself, and the long, lithe trails of con- 
volvulus and karela help, in their lesser way, the 
work of disintegration. 

In Jaipur itself, where East jostles West, at 
times you may still see the last remnants of the 
old Indian sports, unchanged since days long before 
those of the Mohammedan emperors. Now and 
again, in the noonday heat, you may have seen 



42 UNDER THE SUN. 

a leopard crouching along beside its master — 
querulous, uncertain, half-timid, heavily hooded 
with blue silk, and finding the trimmed stone of 
the pavement maddeningly hot beneath its silent 
pads. But it is a different animal when at last 
after a tedious stalk of a herd of black buck, the 
leopard is unhooded from the whining bullock- 
cart and left to his own work. In all the world 
there is little left so savage and so beautiful as this 
steel-springed cat when he scents his quarry. In 
a flash he has dropped to the plain, belly-flat upon 
the hot stones, while he works his way to a ten- 
inch patch of a sage brush, all elbows, and seemingly 
but four inches above the ground. You may see 
the trail of him as he goes. From one bush he 
makes for another or a fold of ground. One 
watches him with a touch of his own silence, though 
the little caravan of bullock carts must still be 
kept moving lest their stopping should alarm the 
buck. So it goes on, this yellow devil edging 
himself nearer and nearer to his chosen prey, till 
while yet fifty yards away the buck raises his head. 
Whether he localises his danger at once or not, 
there is no chance of stalking him a yard further, 
and the cheetah makes his dash. The buck is gone 
like a flash of lightning. There is not a 



JAIPUR. 43 

sound on either side. Two of the fastest animals 
on earth — the cheetah is beyond all question the 
swiftest — engage in a life-and-death race. It is 
soon over, for if the cheetah does not bring his prey 
down in two hundred yards he throws up the chase 
and returns ignominiously to his master. If he 
catches the buck there is an ugly finale of jetting life- 
blood and convulsed limbs and glazing eyes, inter- 
fered with by the cheetah's master, who brings a huge 
wooden spoon filled with blood and entrails, which he 
forcibly substitutes for the buck itself under the still 
sucking muzzle of the unsated leopard. But whether 
he catch his prey or not, the cheetah's flight over the 
ground for two hundred yards is a thing for which 
alone it is almost worth while to go to Jaipur. 

Other barbaric sports still hold their own here. 
All one afternoon there be animal-fighting in 
the Maharaja's arena. Every male beast, and 
not a few birds also, is here pitted against his own 
kind ; stags, goats, buffaloes, rams, boars — every- 
thing that has the power to fight is here brought 
into the lists, and anyone who has once heard the 
sound of the meeting of two fresh and keen rams 
will remember it, with a headache, to this day. 
Little harm is actually done ; most of these duels 
terminate by the exhaustion of both sides, while 



44 UNDER THE SUN. 

the quails, cocks, and partridges seem positively to 
enjoy an occasional set-to in public. Nearer home 
still, the alligators may be fed with lumps of raw 
meat in the huge rectangular tank. At first you will 
hardly believe that there are any of the brutes there 
at all, but the high call of their keeper at a little 
ghat on one side of the reservoir will, after a time, 
cause little whirlpools on the surface of the water, 
and a horny head will rise for a moment, sink, and 
reappear a few yards nearer. When once they have 
been collected and lie at the water's edge, the food 
is thrown, and half-a-dozen ''muggers" snap at the 
gory morsels. You might think that an alligator was 
an unhefty brute until one of them rushes the ramp 
of the ghat for a good twelve feet and snaps its jaws 
together, a yard away from your trouser ends, upon 
some carelessly dropped lump of stringy meat. After 
all, it is but a poor substitute for an erring wife : the 
stomachs of the older brutes are full of glass bangles. 

Yes, one has only to scratch Jaipur to realise 
that the modern commercialism and dull muni- 
cipal excellence of the city is hardly more than a 
veneer, like the dust which lies so heavily. 

There is a strange charm which comes out at 
sunset by reason of this very mantle of drought 
made visible. An hour before the evening falls. 



JAIPUR. 45 

one wanders through wide streets that become mul- 
titudinous as one looks, and bright with colours that 
only Mandalay of all places in the world can hope 
to rival. Scarlet and orange and pink, white, yellow 
and ochre, greens of strange virulence, and greens 
of sad restraint, copper and flame colour and 
orpiment, all blend themselves unerringly in the 
tangled skeins of colour like beds of salpiglossis in 
an English garden. Roadway and wide pavement — 
a rare thing in the East — are filled with the jostling 
throng through which one amazing man in a single 
robe of almost phosphorescent chartreuse — yellow 
and green mixed — makes his way, changing the 
colour values as he goes from group to group. 
Before him and his lambent aureoline-green, magenta 
becomes mauve and sap-green sage, and he leaves 
behind him a wake of mourning hues. 

Here comes an elephant, going delicately in fear of 
his own bulk, gently scattering and sweeping 
humanity aside ; there, a supercilious and shamble- 
quartered camel ; bullocks grey, dun, and white, 
with horns of vermilion or myrtle green ; a blue- 
hooded cheetah, padding nervously along beside his 
master, and always the jolting revolutions of ox- 
cart-wheels, innocent of tyre or axle-grease, and 
patched like a child's box of bricks. 



46 UNDER THE SUN. 

The raw metal jangle of the temple bells sounds 
from behind the rose-red walls of lattice, pillar, 
arch and balcony, and from behind the ochreous 
plaster curtains of different planes, machicolated, 
crenellated, bracketed, over which hangs the acacia 
which finds its own way wherever man plants an 
Eastern plot of garden soil. 

Here and there a circle gathers round a charmer 
or a story-teller, but the city's population mostly 
move quietly forward in hooded thousands, as 
orderly and as aimless as ever was a church parade 
in the Park, a kaleidoscope of moving and inter- 
twining colour. Uncouth feudal retainers of the 
Maharaja, as strange to the city as oneself, blink- 
ingly pick their way along the streets, dressed in 
tarnished chain-armour or quilted suits of rusty 
crimson. Nagas, also collected here on perform- 
ance of grand serjeanty, creep in twos and threes 
along the by-ways, their plumed caps and two- 
handed swords, scabbardless and quivering like a 
flame, stared at by country cousins as oddly habited 
as themselves. Agate and apricot, geranium and 
garnet, all hues of red float past. More magnifi- 
cent than all, there comes an elephant fresh painted 
for to-morrow's state, in geometrical patterns of 
magenta green and yellow, and over all of his bulk, 



JAIPUR. 47 

a huge wrap of half-inch cloth of gold falls like a 
carpet from his shoulder to his feet. But he is 
soon lost to sight in the gathering dusk and dust, 
for the evening has come. 

Before one knows it the nightly mystery of the 
Indian west has spread, and the flaming crimson 
curtain hangs behind a swaying veil of what no 
longer looks like dust, but rather a gauze through 
which the hardly recognisable shapes distorted in 
the coloured gloom move unsteadily to and fro. 
Mountainous bundles, stalks of millet or of maize, 
move forward of their own motion, betrayed only 
by the whining protest of the hidden wheels, 
obscuring, as they pass, the little fires which dot 
the pavements, each burning high and clear as 
the red daylight dies. 

The colours vanish in the veil of fire-opal red 
that blinds and blends all edges and all hues. Only, 
straight above one, is the sky still blue, though there, 
too, the shafts of amethyst are striking home. The 
dinner fires gleam brightly and well against the 
drifting clouds of whitened and half-translucent 
smoke, but two shades deeper than the mist itself. 
The dust sways and glides in coloured lines, and 
the sharp aromatic smell of burning acacia mingles 
with the bitterness of the dust in the nostrils. 



48 UNDER THE SUN. 

Dust, indeed, it is no longer. It is the glory of 
Jaipur. Not for the clearest view on earth would 
one exchange the panorama of misty, white, wood- 
fed flames beside the roads, and the hardly seen 
staging of Oriental lattice and verandah which 
now and then frames a silhouetted figure in a door- 
way. The suspended splendour of the sky sinks 
for a moment, only to rise again with that inex- 
plicable volcanic after-glow which just now supplies 
the self-appointed augurs of the bazaar with 
material for dismal forebodings of death and pesti- 
lence and flight before the enemy — all due, needless 
to say, to the strange tenderness of the Englishman 
for the useless girl babies that come in such numbers 

to the struggling Rajput. " In my day ," but 

he is a known liar, and the story dies away on 
his lips. The crowd seems to sink into the ground 
again, and the loneliness of the road which runs 
out westward to the Residency is emphasised as 
tree after tree swings by in silence, save for its load 
of shrill cicadas grinding their knives in every 
bough, and the never ending refrain of the frogs — 
for all the world like the sound of a stone thrown 
ricocheting along thin English ice — taken up from 
dry pond to dry pond beside the darkening track. 



49 



Delhi. 



Delhi, the mistress of every conqueror of India, 
Aryan or Afghan, Persian, Enghsh or Mogul, 
remains unconquered still. Over twenty square 
miles of sun-baked plain lie out the debris of her 
many pasts, relics of her dead and gone masters, 
some perfect still, some once more crumbling 
back into the levels of red-yellow marl that have 
alternately fed and housed, and fed and housed 
again forgotten generations of men. Yet Delhi 
lives. Like some huge crustacean, she has shed 
behind her her own outgrown habitations, as she 
has crawled northwards from Tughlakabad and 
Lalkot, through Dinpana and Ferozabad, till the 
long, red lizard of the Ridge barred her way, and 
now she suns herself, a raffle of narrow and con- 
gested byways, beneath the crimson walls of Shah 
Jehan's great palace-fort. But Delhi is more than 
her streets and temples. You may go round about 
her and count her towers ; you may tramp from 

4 



50 UNDER THE SUN. 

the Jumna Mas j id to the Fort, from the Fort to 
the Pillar, from the Pillar to Humaion's Tomb 
and the great Minar ; and when all is seen you 
will understand that these things do no honour to 
Delhi ; it is Delhi that doubles their signifi- 
cance, and that of all that is found within her 
wide borders. Inscrutable and undeniable, her 
claim is different from that of all other towns 
of India, for she has no rival in greatness from 
the mountains to the sea, and all men know that 
whoso holds Delhi holds India. A wide and almost 
waste plain stretches along the eastern bank of 
a sandy expanse of river-bed. In the far distance 
low violet hills hem in the horizon, and almost 
every acre of the plain between the river and the 
hills bears its own monument of Delhi's bygone 
days. In among the tangles of thorn-bush and 
mimosa, where no living thing passes by save a 
wandering buffalo or the shadow of a kite 
wheeling high up in the sun, the walls and 
terraces of deserted temples crumble, and the 
white datura or the raw yellow acacia flourishes 
beside the altar stones. Here and there an arch 
springs forty feet to where a bird-borne pipal- 
plant slowly threatens a lingering keystone, 
and an azure-necked peacock scratches among 



DELHI. it 

the rotting stumps of last year's self-sown Indian 
corn. 

Beyond the hard white shaded road — the only 
serviceable and well-kept thing in all the land- 
scape — rises in a garden the dome of an osten- 
tatious tomb. Some servant of an Emperor, some 
Emperor himself it may be, who sleeps soundly 
in his grave, all unconscious that the city he be- 
lieved so abiding and so loyal has drifted far from 
him and his all-powerful dynasty, and now darkens 
the northward sky with the smoke of factory 
chimneys, and of locomotives straining across the 
iron-bridged Jumna. Far away to the south still 
stands the shaft raised by the slave-emperor from 
Turkestan, and underneath it the iron pillar of 
an earlier " conqueror of the universe " bears 
witness yet to its Royal maker's foolishness. 
Tughlakabad, hard by, is given over to the jackal 
and the cobra and the owl — the very bats have 
found in it no ceiling for their foul nestings. 
Lalkot lies a weed-grown fold of scattered half- 
hewn stone and mud ; it needs an antiquarian to 
guess where here and there a gate may once have 
pierced the vaunted fortifications of old. In- 
draprastha is there still, but she has given up 
the struggle against fate, and her cornices and 

4* 



S^ UNDER THE SUN. 

parapets fall unheeded across her exits and her 
entrances. Only the Grand Trunk Road endures 
between and beneath the shadows of the heavy 
banyans above^ whose leaves are whitened daily 
by the dust-shuffling bullock-carts, just as when 
Shah Jehan's vast equipage trailed slowly in to his 
new capital from that old one, which had become a 
burden upon his heart too heavy for him to bear. 
A few minarets have pierced the skyline for some 
time, but as one follows along its clear metalled 
strip, Delhi itself — Delhi, that is, of to-day — rises 
fiat and uncomely behind her long, low, fortified 
and battlemented walls. Outside, the glacis is 
clear, save for a few yellow-flowered bebels and 
a crumbling chaitya or two ; inside there is the 
well-remembered jostle and stench of every native 
quarter of the East, and so through eight-foot 
thoroughfares below jutting eaves and, rarely, 
dirty balconies, one reaches the one great street 
that cleaves the town in halves, the famous Chandni 
Chauk. 

Meagre, ramshackle houses — one-storeyed, and 
plastered with torn paper, their dirty blue paint 
smeared over decayed whitewash — lean one against 
the other, and expose on their vermin-haunted 
walls and raised floors cheap European goods or 



DELHI. 53 

trays of fly-blown native sweets, bowls of chillies 
or onions, framed oleographs of gods or English 
princes, American nickel clocks, or scrap-iron heaps. 
In between them some brick and mortar missionary 
station puts out its nigh-hopeless appeal, or some 
native chemist advertises his willingness to practise 
indifferently the medical system of either East or 
West. But the real shops of the " Silver Street " 
are those which make little show to the public eye. 
You can hardly believe that those unpretentious 
little cabins, where the scarlet-teethed shopmen in 
alpaca coats smile upon you as you pass, have within 
call half the jewels of India. Down the middle of 
the Chandni Chauk runs a line of branching banyans 
— such as Tavernier found useful in his trade, for 
he says that one can judge the water of a diamond 
best in the dappled shade of a leafy tree — their 
trunks all mud below where the bhisti sprinkles, 
all dust above, and at the end of them, across the 
burnt grass of the Maidan, rise the dusty crimson 
walls of the fort. 

There is much for a man to see in Delhi ; there 
is even more waiting for him to understand. One 
might set him with muffled feet upon the gigantic 
courtyard of the Great Mosque or the blinding 
white marble of the dainty Moti Mas j id ; one 



54 UNDER THE SUN. 

might take him day after day to temples and halls 
of audience, and baths ; there are crumbling 
memorials of the Mutiny for him to see ; Hindu 
Rao's house, the Kashmir gate beneath which some 
still salute dead Home and Salkeld as they pass, 
and the tree-encumbered sites of redoubt and 
battery ; for those who pick the worm-holes of 
long- vanished days there is Asoka's pillar ; there 
is the already over-grown site of the great Durbar, 
for those whose interests are of to-day. But 
among all these things two stand out significant. 
One of them is the Diwan-i-khas, or private throne- 
room, of the palace in the fort. 

It is an open hall, supported on a double row 
of many-cusped arches, daintily gilded here and 
there, and of heavy square columns, panelled 
and inlaid, of marble, here white, here ivory, there 
old gold in tint. One could swear that this forest 
of marble is translucent. The gilding upon it 
here and there stands forward and rejects the light 
that sinks softly into the onyx-like stone, upon 
which it is laid. And the inlaid flowers, whereof 
every leaf is jade and malachite, every petal is 
agate and lapis lazuli, so stand out upon this pearly 
bed that you might vow you could put your fingers 
behind the stalk and snap it. You will not at 



DELHI. 55 

first understand the beauty and splendid restraint 
of the Diwan-i-khas ; if you try four afternoons 
to sketch you may begin to reahse that Austin 
de Bordeaux, a dishonest and fugitive jeweller 
from France, may yet prove to have been the 
first decorator of all known periods — decorator, not 
artist, nor perhaps architect, the point is in dis- 
pute. Quiet, restrained, his riot of colour spreads 
over these jewelled walls unfailing in taste, and 
perfect to the veining of a poppy-leaf or the stamen 
of one of those Crown Imperial lilies or blue-purple 
irises, which his craftsmen never looked upon, though 
at the bidding of this immoral genius they faithfully 
translated into stone the humbled pride of the one 
and the cool transparency of the other. Everywhere 
the design is both natural and conventional, and 
the harmony of this vast and transcendent casket 
for the Peacock Throne deserves the famous Persian 
inscription, " If heaven be anywhere on earth, 
it is here, it is here, it is here." Outside there is 
hot sunshine, the blaze of a scarlet hybiscus across 
the lawn, and the soft and stealing scent of jasmine 
and orange-blossom. 

The Peacock Throne — of which Lord Curzon 
has disinterred in the treasure-house of Teheran 
a noble fragment far finer than the Takt-i-taus 



56 UNDER THE SUN. 

which is generally shown to visitors as part of the 
spoils of Nadir Shah — was of gold. But the gold 
was scarcely visible for the rubies, diamonds, and 
sapphires, close set from end to end of the long 
low seat. A peacock " in his pride " stood 
behind at either end, and formed between them 
the greater part of the back. These two were of 
precious stones, only, I think, larger than those 
used in the seat. Also a parrot ensigned the 
centre of the back of the throne — the bird was 
cut from one single emerald. These statements 
appear to be the plain truth about the most mag- 
nificent jewel ever made on earth. They would be 
incredible had not, luckily, a French professional 
jeweller seen the throne before it was stolen by 
Nadir Shah in 1739 and partly broken up. 
Tavernier has left not only a description of the 
gorgeous thing, but an expert's estimate of its 
value — about £12,037,500 sterling, if expressed in 
to-day's currency. We have the casket of this 
jewel in the Diwan-i-khas, and it is worthy of that 
royal seat, even if the latter' s beauty was equal 
to its cost. And in the Diwan-i-khas we have 
also the keynote and coping-stone of the policy 
of the Mogul dynasty of India. 

But there is another thing to be seen in Delhi. 





A corner of the Diwan-i-khas. 



[Facing page 56. 



DELHI. 57 

Outside the battered Kashmir gate, whereto leans 
the plain stone which commemorates Home and 
Salkeld, is a stretch of uneven grass cut into by 
a diverging road. Across that, a little rise takes 
one through the cemetery gates, adjoining the squat 
lodge of the keeper, up to a railed-off tomb under- 
neath a neem-tree. Inside there is a flat stone, 
with these words upon it : " The grave of Brigadier 
General John Nicholson, who led the assault of 
Delhi, but fell in the hour of victory, mortally 
wounded ; and died 23rd September, 1857 : aged 
35." There have been many lives worth living 
in the last hundred years, but few indeed are fit 
to set beside John Nicholson's. There have been 
many deaths worth dying, but surely none since 
Nelson's that compares with his. Two men in 
two centuries regained India for us at the eleventh 
hour as she was slipping from our very fingers' 
ends. One — Clive — has long been forgotten ; in 
all the length of this statue-laden country there 
is not a bust or a tablet to him. Twopenny- 
ha'penny administrators, banded about with ribands, 
have had their brazen tributes in every corner of 
India, while Clive, perhaps because he took his 
own life, still awaits his recognition. For his 
memorial, when it shall come, one is tempted to 



58 UNDER THE SUN. 

suggest " circumspice " once again as the only but 
sufficient record of his work. Of John Nicholson 
it can hardly be said that he has been forgotten, for 
in England he has never been recognised at all, 
while, on the other hand, out here in India the 
money for the statue that is even now being raised 
at Delhi in his honour, has come from such a 
variety of admirers that one is reminded of the 
austere administrator's popularity while he lived 
even among the very tribes whose women scared 
their children into quietness with the mere name of 
** Jan Nikasain." For English rule in India John 
Nicholson stands just as the gold and emeralds 
and marble of the Diwan-i-khas stand for the 
Mogul and his ideals. 

But if there still survive a spirit of that dead 
and splendid dynasty, it does but breathe in the 
night wind that stirs the dead grasses along the 
Campagna of bygone Delhi, while Nicholson's ghost 
walks visibly abroad wherever sound and unselfish 
work is done by the lowest sahib-servant of this 
huge and helpless people entrusted to our care. 



59 



Lahore. 



Fresh gardens and heavy trees beside well-kept 
roads^ cool houses, and an upstanding English 
cathedral, dispersed over four square miles of 
ground, and beside the Mall the bitter smell and 
silence of a tan gallop. Offices there are, too, for 
the Punjab Government, roomy, and adequate ; 
hospitals and colleges, institutes and horticultural 
gardens — all that makes for contentment and effi- 
ciency in Anglo-Indian life, gathered loosely over 
the flat between the curbed Ravi and the curving 
parallels of the great Bari Doab Canal. Thrust 
tightly into one upper corner of this city of dis- 
tances and spaces, and nudging it uncertainly in 
half a dozen places, are the crooked elbows of the 
densely-packed native town. Beyond that, again, 
overlooking the wooded level to the north, an in- 
hospitable bulk of red sandstone rises, sign unmis- 
takable of yet another of the palace fortresses of 
the Moguls — this is Lahore, 



6o UNDER THE SUN. 

In Lahore Akbar's shrewd judgment selected a 
green oasis among the then mifertile lands of the 
five rivers, and to him much of all the imperial mag- 
nificence of the city and palace is due. Yet, truth 
to tell, it comes to most travellers too late in their 
path. Agra and Delhi have come before it, and 
there is nothing in all the place to equal the dreamy 
perfection of the one or the costly splendour of the 
other. Only Akbar's huge gateway, with its en- 
caustic tiles, strikes a note of originality, and the 
idle dreamer might spend an afternoon in piecing 
together from this strange and inconsequent series 
of figures of beasts and flowers and men and angels 
some key to that most elusive of all Oriental cha- 
racters, Akbar himself. It is commonly said that 
one of the strait, stiff figures on the walls is no 
other than that of the Virgin Mary herself, and the 
suggestion is likely enough. Certainly Akbar's 
acquaintance with the Christianity of the Portu- 
guese missionaries of Goa is proved. It is also 
clear that the priests were allowed some access to 
Murad and Jehangir,* his sons, and his Hall of 
Universal Worship at Fatehpur Sikri was almost 
American in its catholic tolerance. But it is difficult 



* Upon the walls also of Jehangir's adjoining palace Bernier says that an image 
of the Virgin was set up, but it is impossible to trace it now. 




AHME D AB AD . 



LAHORE. 6i 

to disentangle fact and fiction in Oriental history 
as soon as religion is brought into the dispute. 
Indeed, the well-known legend that Akbar had a 
Christian wife — one Maria, a Portuguese maiden 
from Goa — seems to rest on the prejudiced inter- 
pretations of the missionaries of a later generation. 
Still, the man remains one of the enigmas of history, 
and in this hotch-potch of ornament it is a plea- 
sant fancy that he may have had the whim to sym- 
bolise to himself his own infinitely varied interests, 
sympathies, and perhaps, if one had the clue, 
one might trace some of the vicissitudes also of 
his strange career. 

But the thread of personal self-confidence runs 
all through his life. He asked no man to do what 
he would not, and could not, do himself. He 
once relieved Ahmedabad with a not inconsider- 
able force of cavalry, and kept up the speed of 
eighty miles a day. On another occasion he out- 
rode completely the Ghent to Aix legend by 
reaching Ajmere from Agra, a distance of two 
hundred and twenty miles, in forty-eight hours. 
This he did for his own exercise and amusement, 
afterwards repeating the pilgrimage on foot in 
order to obtain a son and heir. In quiet days, 
lest he should wax rusty and luxurious, he exe- 



62 UNDER THE SUN, 

cuted a Domesday Book of his territories. His 
income was ;£52,ooo,ooo a year, all of which was 
available for his ambitions. Consider his action at 
Fatehpur Sikri. To be with his teacher, the 
Sheikh Chisti, he builds a vast new palace-fort, 
new temples, and a new town round the hermit's 
lonely cell. He invites the learned of all religions 
to argue and dispute in his presence, and then, in 
the midst of this new prosperity, at a word of 
complaint from his religious friend about the noise 
that his city brought round his sequestered cell, 
gave orders, and Fatehpur Sikri became again 
as Nineveh, save that the clean chisel-marks may 
yet be seen upon the palace jambs and cornices. 
Certainly a man of decision and self-reliance. 

There is a certain suitability in remembering the 
theological experiments of Akbar in this his capital 
of Lahore. For to-day also here is the centre of 
religious activity in the northern half of India, and 
even a slight acquaintance with the town must 
convince a visitor that if only for this reason the 
atmosphere of Lahore is, and must remain, different 
from that of other places. This is not the time 
or place to awaken the ever-vexed question of 
the success or failure of missionary effort among 
the races and castes of Hindustan. But it should 




Kim on Zam-Zammah. 



\^Facing page 62. 



LAHORE. 63 

in fairness be remembered that Lahore offers the 
best example of such work — work that, to its ever- 
lasting honour, concerns itself almost as mightily 
with the bodies as with the souls of the natives, 
whose confidence and gratitude have long been 
won. Akbar himself, it is to be borne in mind, 
was the founder of a religion which seems to have 
been a worship of Brahma or God the Creator, so 
basic and bold as to have been stripped of all but 
the enunciation of this one aboriginal article of 
faith. Upon this austere framework he then per- 
mitted all other sects to weave at will the distin- 
guishing creeds and dogmas of their choice. It was 
thus unnecessary and, indeed, difficult to exclude 
from this over-universal church any faith that cared 
to emphasise its somewhat postulated belief in 
a First Cause. Perhaps for that very reason, 
because there was so little with which to disagree, 
so little about which to suffer martyrdom, Akbar' s 
great scheme was doomed to failure, dying for sheer 
want of opposition. But as a bold attempt on the 
part of the greatest reformer, administrator, and 
despot of India, it has hardly received the attention 
that it deserves, especially at this moment, when 
education and religion seem likely to come to a com- 
promise upon a highest common factor not wholly 



64 UNDER THE SUN. 

different from that which underlay the faith of 

Akbar. 

In his large industry, capricious energy, auto- 
cratic methods, and confidence that he was in 
the personal confidence of God, the Emperor 
has his parallel in Germany to-day. Flaring 
upon the western pier of the gigantic gateway 
of the mosque at Fatehpur Sikri is the saying of 
Jesus Christ of Nazareth : " This world is as a 
bridge. Pass on, there is no tarrying here." Yet 
Akbar was far from being untouched by worldly 
pomps, as his slightest building testifies, and one 
is inclined to believe that he was well aware of the 
ambiguity of the war-cry of his new faith. '' AUahu- 
Akbar" means either that God is great or that 
Akbar is God, and neither meaning was probably 
ever absent from his mind ; nay, on one grim 
occasion, he felt the blasphemy, and retreated in 
confusion from the pulpit whence he was intoning 
his own creed. 

In old days, before the creation of the North- West 
Frontier province, great was the pride of the 
Punjab ; great in its own estimation was Lahore. 
There has been a fall, and the rest of the 
peninsula shows little sympathy with this much 
and deservedly lauded home of municipal ad- 



LAHORE. 65 

ministration. Its ^' C. and M. Gazette" — foster sister 
to the fine old '' Pioneer " — has done its best, but 
the old glory is departed. There are many who 
regret the manner of her deposition : the act was 
inevitable. The truth is that its interests have 
become provincial rather than national, and that, 
as in the case of Madras, has sounded the death- 
knell of its old half -romantic attractiveness. Its 
frontier importance was the framework of its old 
pretensions, and now that that has been taken 
away there is as little and as much to fill out the 
garments of her past greatness as there is in the 
case of Madras. The administrative work is done 
equally well in both provinces. Indeed, for ad- 
ministrative models, India now turns rather to 
Madras than to Lahore, for in the jealous eyes of 
other districts, even this supremacy is departing 
from the northern city. But Lahore still holds a 
high head. All India smiled a year or two ago. 
An inscription had to be framed for the memorial 
to William Brendish, the telegraph clerk, whose 
fidelity to his post while Delhi roared and mur- 
dered in the streets without needs no retelling here 
" The electric telegraph saved India." Montgomery's 
verdict is on the record, but the good folk of 
Lahore put on the memorial this artless ascription 

5 



66 UNDER THE SUN. 

of credit, that Brendish had '' rendered invaluable 
service to the Punjab Government." To this day 
few in Lahore outside the office of the " Civil and 
Military " have seen the humour of this. 

For the rest, Lahore and its picturesque variety 
of construction, material, and style is like enough 
to any other North Indian city, like in the crowded 
sea of humanity in her streets, like in the passing 
interest evoked by the shrine of a saint, the tomb 
of a courtier, or one of those random mosques that 
so often took the place of conscience-money in the 
East, like in the dainty legends of love or hate, 
of the favour of a king, or the jealousy of a woman, 
that mesh in every gathering of human habitations 
in royal India. Ranjit Singh is buried here, and 
with him the eleven Court ladies who passed alive 
through the fiery gate with his dead body. The 
armoury distinguishes the fort from others, and 
a trace of especial interest attaches to the French 
accoutrements which tells a tale of long-vanished 
ambitions. Here, also, is the identical sword with 
which the first great Guru founded the Sikh re- 
ligion. The latter may also, I believe, be seen in 
the treasury of the Golden Temple at Amritsar. 

I have kept to the last the central interest of 
Lahore. The museum treasures, among which the 



LAHORE. 67 

Lama of Such-zen discussed the Way with the 
white-bearded EngHshman, remain for the anti- 
quarian, the traveller, and the historian one of 
the fascinating enigmas of India. They are now 
housed in a new and spacious building, and all down 
the long gallery and on either side the close-set 
relics stand side by side. Strange memorials are 
they of the day when two empires, Buddhism and 
Hellenism, met and mingled where three empires 
now meet but never mingle — nay, they draw, 
instead, painfully exact lines of division and dis- 
like. Greek in all but name, these full-rounded 
faces and royally posed heads surmount drapery 
such as India could never hang. It is a tale that 
has not yet been told in full, this slow reception 
of the exiles of a defeated and expelled faith, by 
frontiersmen, exiles themselves, in whom no luxury 
or pride had betrayed the tradition of Pheidias and 
his school. Nowhere in the world is Buddhism por- 
trayed so finely as in these stones. For the essential 
and tranquil quietism of the Master's creed lost 
nothing and gained humanity in the hands of men 
whose forefathers carved the Venus of Milo or the 
Demeter of the British Museum. Both exiles and 
hosts among these Himalayan barriers of the north 
had relearned in hard life and forced renunciation 



68 UNDER THE SUN. 

some portion of those primitive truths that were 
so quickly swamped in the laziness and easy living 
of the plains from which each had originally 
come. 

Nor is this all their interest for us. These 
blackened, sharply-cut stones, still showing chisel 
marks, if you look for them, are all, or nearly all, 
that is left of Buddhism in India, in the land of its 
birth ; all, at least, that can connectedly, and with 
wealth of example, retell the story of the Light of 
Asia scene by scene and triumph by triumph. 
These carvings have been collected by many hands 
along the frontier. They were rescued from the 
neglect of those who follow a creed different indeed 
from that of the Master, and it is well that they 
are gathered here together, for even now, many 
years after the discovery of most of the statues, 
a scholar would have to take his life in his hand 
were he to re-visit the hill-villages from which 
they came. There are still many places teeming 
with Graeco-Buddhist treasures, but the Lahore 
collection is so rich, indeed so sated with duplicates, 
that one may almost regard this collection as com- 
plete for most necessary purposes. And we owe 
it all to that white-bearded Englishman, no other 
than Mr. Lockwood Kipling, that we have these 



LAHORE. 69 

treasures safely housed in Lahore. For it is a 
mistake to suppose that Indian officials, even 
to-day, care much for the archaeology of their 
district. There are exceptions, of course, Lord 
Curzon, while viceroy, being himself the chief, 
but, in old days, it needed strength and courage, 
as well as knowledge and taste, to foster the unique 
collection which, when all is said and done, remains 
the real treasure of the capital of the province of 
the Five Great Rivers of Hindustan. Nay, these 
half prehistoric relics will be of scant interest to 
many travellers as well. So let them take garries 
and drive six miles out to the marble pavilions 
and exquisitely confined waters of the Shalimar 
Gardens. 



70 



The Khyber. 



For one thousand five hundred miles from its source 
on the right bank of the Hugh, thirty miles north 
of Calcutta, the Grand Trunk Road unfolds its thin, 
shadow-flecked ribbon of white metal across the 
heart of India. By Gaya, Benares, Delhi, Amritsar, 
and Lahore, on to the gates of far-distant Pesha- 
war, beyond the ken of the farthest surveyor of the 
engineers of Aurangzeb, the track strikes fairly 
across the densest populations of the peninsula. 
Nay, on through the pass itself it is but the Grand 
Trunk Road that has been carried on yet another 
stage. A hundred yards beyond the fort of Landi 
Kotal, the Khyber witnesses the extinction of the 
most historic highway of the East, and up to the last 
rod of it the great trail is worthy of its reputation. 

It was well enough said the other day that 
nothing, however important, in the internal ad- 
ministration of India can ever hope to rival in 
interest the frontier questions — those eternal prob- 




The Shalimar Gardens, Lahore. 




The End of the Grand Trunk Road, Vjeyond Landi Kolal. 

[^I^'aciiig /lag'e 70. 



THE KHYBER. n 

lems symbolised by the golden roofs of Lhasa and 
the grim defiles of the Khyber. It is all the less 
accountable, therefore, that there hardly exists, 
for anyone who has not actually visited the spot, 
any very clear idea of the famous cleft in the Hima- 
layas through which the thin trickle of merchandise 
ebbs and flows between India and the North, and 
on which so many years of hard military work 
and close political thought have been concentrated. 
India — the remark is a platitude — so far as the 
passage of large bodies of troops is concerned, is 
an island except for this scanty line of communica- 
tion, and upon the safe keeping of the Khyber 
and its auxiliaries, most of the Indian military 
strategy of fifty years has been pivoted. 

Out from Peshawar one goes along the hard, 
grey, enamelled track, past the gardens and trees 
of the cantonment, which appears to be peaceful, 
even beyond the ordinary stagnation of these 
deceptive enclaves of military control. Nothing 
could prepare one less for what is to come than 
the luxurious growth of close-grown tolly, umbra- 
geous banyan, and dusty-spined casuarina, over- 
hanging the low white-washed walls that divide 
the compounds and the coarsely-grassed lawns 
from the roadway. Grass is the trouble of Indian 



72 UNDER THE SUN. 

gardens. There is a stretch or two at Calcutta and 
at Agra ; lawns are encouraged to continue to live 
round Akbar's tomb and the Taj, but it is all rather 
a pretence, and Lord Kitchener, at the Pindi 
manoeuvres last year, boldly faced the fact that 
turf — as opposed to grass — is an exotic, and bought 
instead twenty hundredweight of mustard and cress 
seed to make the little plot of his great encampment 
green and soft underfoot. It was rumoured that 
had there been another maund in India he would 
have bought it also. 

Every now and then the square, low walls of a 
barrack can be seen through the trees, and the 
last examining station is passed close beside the 
police lines on the south side of the road. It is 
neither of interest nor importance in itself, but 
close on the post the scene changes with a sudden- 
ness that is unmistakable. Man has combined with 
Nature to put a sudden end here to the greenery 
and the groves of polyglot Peshawar. Man de- 
manded a clear glacis of a mile for his riflemen, 
uncovered, flat, and from end to end capable of 
being commanded and swept by those innocent- 
looking, khaki-tinted mud-walls ; but even before 
the farthest edge of this mile was reached, Nature 
had given up its brave struggle with the increasing 



THE KHYBER. 73 

aridity and the uncompromising stoniness of the 
last up-wash of India against the Himalayan 
barrier. Henceforth it is a rocky and treeless 
waste. The road still strikes westwards^ level, 
straight, and smooth. On either side the coarse 
sand of the plain stretches away, rarely furrowed 
here and there by dry watercourses, nourishing 
here and there an even rarer patch of tilth. It is 
used occasionally as a divisional parade ground, 
though, for the most part of the year, it lies out as 
empty as the sea. 

To right and left the mountain spurs have thrust 
themselves forward to meet one on either side, but 
the gullet of the Khyber is not reached for some six 
or seven miles yet, so deeply into the hills does 
this tongue of Indian sand penetrate. To right 
and left the long promontories of grey gault, 
clad only with spotted bushes of stunted wild 
olive, advance spies of their gigantic brethren 
whose blue outlines blend into the sky, mount up- 
wards from the plain till they are capped and 
pinnacled or overborne by the heavy walls of 
Himalayan gneiss and granite. In the middle of 
this deep recess stands up Jamrud, yellow in the 
sun, blue purple in the shade, a fine, upstanding 
fort of mud and stone, embattled and bastioned like 



74 UNDER THE SUN. 

the fortress of a fairy tale, and perhaps almost as 
useless against modern weapons. Just as the flag 
on the keep's summit can be distinguished, India 
stops beneath one's feet. 

Here is the frontier ; beyond is no man's land. 
Ours, indeed, it is, by the right of the nine points of 
the law, and by the necessity of the case, but part 
of India it is not. Three miles short of Jamrud 
the turmoils and the administrative problems, the 
constitutional rights and duties, the dust and 
thrust of our Imperial altruism fall behind, and we 
come out into the real arena to face the elemental 
facts of life. Here self-preservation is the only 
law that sanctions, and the game is played with 
vigour, and with something of the law of the jungle 
besides. Jamrud and the Khyber do not exist for 
the delectation of idle men. It is true that on 
occasions when it may be convenient, when, that 
is, the pass is guarded, and its peaceful transit 
guaranteed for some other purpose than that of 
curiosity, for such a purpose as the passage of the 
bi-weekly caravan from Kabul, then, and only then, 
may the idler have leave to drive out to see the 
entering in of the famous defile. He will enjoy it 
the more because of his fearful and delightful belief 
that he takes his life in his hand, and that behind 



THE KHYBER. 75 

each rock may lurk the jezail and hairy ruffian of 
his long expectation. As a matter of fact, he will 
but be rudely treated by camels and will suffer 
much dust. His life will be safer far in the pass 
than when in a hired fly he went yesterday down 
into Peshawar bazaar from the hotel to buy a 
handful of turquoises from a fat Parsee merchant 
lolling over his accounts, or a Penjdeh rug in the 
foul donkey market, where among the mud and 
dung and flies the real treasures are unwillingly 
spread out to those who understand — bhnking 
" elephant-foot " sun- traps of maroon and crimson, 
and creamy white, bound about with white and 
black yak-hair ropes, or Khirgah purdahs with 
" snuff " terminals, glowing with the purples 
and greens of a pheasant's neck. Europeans 
are not wanted here. Gregson is allowed in always, 
and Colonel Hendley might even be welcomed 
as one initiated, but these glories of Central Asian 
work, each the work of seven or, maybe, seventeen 
years, are marked down by such men as Ghulam 
Mahommed " the lame," or Ghulam Rasul, mer- 
chants of Rawal Pindi. Englishmen do not under- 
stand their value yet. But if you go and buy them 
in Peshawar you may get in the way of a ghazi — 
a poor devil earning Paradise at your expense. If 



76 --' UNDER THE SUN. 

you keep to the road in the Khyber you are safer 
than at many a London crossing. 

From Jamrud the road still runs on the flat 
across a wide, torrent-seamed bed of rock and sand, 
up to the very tip of the tongue of land. Here 
the ascent begins between rough boulder-strewn 
slopes ; these soon give way to steep acclivities and 
shoulders of bare rock, round which the road sweeps 
and recurs in an easy and ever-ascending gradient. 
The Shadi-bagiari blockhouse commands the en- 
trance to the pass, and Fort Maude follows soon, 
just where the old plastered bridge between the 
wild mulberry and the tolly tree imports a breath 
of greenery and civilisation into the rocky wilder- 
ness between the bare blasted-out road at one's 
feet and the forbidding grassless skyline far over- 
head. Still ascending, the road skirts Shahgai 
and the little cultivation plots of Lala-china a mile 
or two before the tiny high-perched group of block- 
houses known as Ali Masjid. The name is taken 
from a blindingly whitewashed little shrine that 
marks a grave in a little plot a few feet above the 
little stream. The Khyber rivulet flashes by, 
muttering between its pebbles, and sadly dwindled 
by the irrigation canal that runs sedately beside 
it, closely hugging the contours of the rock. 



THE KHYBER. 77 

On the opposite side rises the sharp conical pro- 
montory or group of promontories which guards the 
gorge itself. For here — and here alone, through- 
out the pass's length till Landi Kotal is reached — 
there is a steep rock-bound defile, out of which the 
road is cut on the north-eastern side, and by which 
all further view of the Khyber is entirely shut out. 
This sense of privacy is emphasised by the road 
sentries a hundred yards further on. No one, 
except those who are accompanied by a " Khyber 
Rifle " as an escort, is allowed to pass this barrier, 
and the escort is only granted for special reasons. 
Bribery, blarney, or bluff, all are useless here, and 
it is as well that you should not try to steal through. 
Neither English nor Hindustani do the warders 
understand, but their orders they most entirely do, 
and a German who tried to force his way through, 
the other day, was significantly congratulated on 
the failure of his attempt. For here is business, 
real business — short shrifts are given, and few 
excuses are accepted. 

The blockhouses of the Khyber are models of 
their kind, and the very sight of their shrewdly- 
pierced loopholes, their machicoulis galleries, and 
their first-floor entrances and hanging ladders, 
will impress you long before you notice that at your 



78 UNDER THE SUN. 

elbow, on the rock beside you, is a careless splash of 
whitewash — five hundred yards range this one, 
and across the valley a deftly-placed series from 
three hundred to one thousand — a splash which 
one day it will be sheer suicide to approach. Still 
climbing, the road now follows the course of the 
tinkling stream, now strikes across the bottom of 
a tiny fiat pan of ploughland, just where, beside 
the road, ill-shapen masses of wood are being 
weighed. They have been brought in by women 
from the hills, and to-morrow will have started 
down to Peshawur, which takes every stick of 
firewood that the pass can provide. From one 
point of view, this stripping of the pass has its 
advantages — for even as late as forty years ago the 
hillsides were thickly-wooded enough to afford 
considerable cover — but the loss of the vegetation 
affects, and is in turns affected by, the rainfall, to 
an extent which is annually becoming more and 
more unmistakable. Gnarled and stunted wild 
olives, two or three species of thorn, rarely a 
rowan tree — still more rarely upon the higher slopes 
to the north, a small oak which is known locally as 
a totarra — these make up the robuster vegetation 
of the valley. 

Major Roos Keppel, the presiding deity of the 



THE KHYBER. 79 

pass, enforces law and order in a quaint and effec- 
tive way. In the rights and wrongs of tribal 
disputes he will not enter. Only one thing is 
sacred — the Road. On that road no man shall be 
killed. Twenty yards to right and left is the 
hunting-ground of the Khels, and Keppel is not 
there to meddle. But woe betide the village 
within whose district a road-murder occurs. 

So this little strip of civilisation runs on, beset 
on either side with the manners and customs 
of Troglodytes armed with magazine rifles. At 
Katakushta we pass from the territory of the 
Malik-dins to that of the Wall Khels, and we enter 
the Khyber proper. This name is given by the 
Khels to a comparatively small and insignificant 
part of the pass. A Kuki Khel from Shadi-bagiari 
and a Zakka Khel from Landi Kotal will speak 
alike of making a journey to the Khyber ; Ali 
Mas j id itself is regarded as being outside the limits, 
and the adoption of the name by ourselves for the 
entire pass is due chiefly, of course, to the con- 
venience of having some inclusive name, but partly 
also to the fact that in this part of the gorge, near 
Zin-tarra, there is the one and only remarkable monu- 
ment of its entire length. This is a large and origin- 
ally a well-built Buddhist tope. An Indian tope 



8o UNDER THE SUN. 

is a plain structure dating in almost every case 
from a comparatively early period — being, of 
course, in date anterior to, or contemporary with, 
the expulsion of the Buddhists from India in the 
seventh and eighth centuries ; this, as perhaps 
making a refuge to which the expelled Buddhists 
escaped, may be somewhat later, — consisting of a 
platform surmounted by a plain dome. Much of 
the exterior casing of the Zin-tarra tope has been 
pulled down for building material, but it preserves 
its shape, and in one less accessible part it still 
keeps its closely-fitted exterior masonry. The dome 
must originally have been about as large as that 
of the Invalides, and the square platform below 
projects well beyond the drum. 

Beyond the tope and the twin villages of the 
Sultan Khels and the Niklei Khels, the road lifts 
to the watershed plateau, where the long low blank 
walls of Landi Kotal command a hundred acres 
of fairly level ground, Landi Kotal is not built 
for beauty, but inside its fortifications is a plea- 
sant little garden, where there is a well overrun 
with purple convolvulus and zinnias, and rambling 
roses prepare one for the few stout shafts of English 
hollyhock which bloom sturdily enough in this 
Ultima Thule of Britain. Nor is this all that 




^0 



THE KHYBER. 8i 

reminds one of home. Inside the mess of the 
Khyber Rifles, there, on the wall in front of you, 
is a series of '' Spy's " portraits and — an engraving 
of the " Beata Beatrix " ! Yet one is really in the 
uttermost of all outposts, and the precautions of a 
post in the enemy's country are stringently ob- 
served by day and by night. 

One can still walk three or four miles on, beyond 
the friendly levels of the Grand Trunk Road, over 
a rough camel track and cart road, to a lonely post 
called Mishnai Khandao, perched on the edge of 
a precipitous rock. From here, Pisgah-like, you 
may dangle your legs over, and look down upon the 
" Black Stones " and the interlocking spurs of the 
pass to the flat brown plain and the far white 
minarets of an Afghan tomb beside the Kabul river. 

Through the sunset we went back to Landi 
Kotal, passing through the large walled compound, 
where the Kafila or Kabul caravan was resting for 
the night. Great shaggy-throated and black-headed 
camels, half as tall again as those of India, loomed 
out of the obscurity, and tiny groups of incurious 
women and lazy men gathered round the gipsy 
fires, at which the evening meal was being cooked. 
Half-round each party lay a rampart of the heavy 
corded bundles they were bringing into India. Out- 



82 UNDER THE SUN. 

side the wall of the compound one could see a dozen 
heads rise and fall together in outline against the 
darkening sky as the last prayer of the day was 
said and the last prostration made to the red west 
that curtained distant Mecca. Almost in the dark 
we went back past the three water-tanks, stumbling 
up against a placid Shinwari, who, for an expected 
gain of a few pice, was trudging along to distant 
Peshawar beside his pony, laden with dirty snow 
from the winter pits of Mallagori. 



83 



Agra. 



The waters of the holy Jumna, descending idly 

to her even holier sister-stream, fetch a wide 

half-circle through their ever-shifting " javeaux " 

and the firm, flat, sandy islets where the city's 

washing makes gay mosaic in the morning sun. 

Agra crowds down to the water's edge along the 

outer curve. In flood time the opaque green 

waters, as they sweep round from north-east to 

north-east again, lap nearly up to the stark walls of 

the Mogul fort, which stands out from afar, the 

crimson heart of the dun, dull, dome-spotted native 

city. In the early dawn the skeins of river mist 

sway, like white gauze, all round the great curve, 

and just before they float upwards and are dissipated 

they catch the amethyst of the false sunrise that 

precedes the up-leap of the strong Indian sun 

across the low, empty levels of the eastern bank. 

Beyond the fort the houses retreat from the river's 

margin, and a space of tangled scrub and low jungle 

6* 



84 UNDER THE SUN. 

dips to the sandy waste through which the Jumna 
picks her way. A mile and a half down stream, 
among her own forest trees and high on her own 
marble river- wall, rises the Taj. 

The last resting-place of Shah Jehan and the 
woman he loved is for many travellers, perhaps for 
all, the crown and goal of all that India has of 
beauty and romance. Generations have come and 
gone since that far day when the most splendid 
of all earth's emperors bowed his head to the dust 
before his darling's tiny little coffin in the vault of 
the finished Taj, all new and white and glistening. 
There has hardly been a traveller in all that time 
who, in his own way, sage or sentimental, has not 
tried to set down his estimate of this marvel in 
stone. Some have found safety in mere suggestion 
and a reverent withdrawal from the task ; others 
have laid their measuring chains along its courses 
from plinth to crescent finial, vainly seeking in 
exact computation the secret that died in the very 
lifetime of the architect, died with the occasion 
that called forth the Taj. Yet for all their pains, 
for all that the building is better known than any 
other in the world, there may still be room for a 
plain description of the tomb of Arjumand, the 
Exalted of the Palace. Photography has done its 



AGRA. 85 

best, but it is possible that nothing has ever baffled 
the lens so elusively as these white marbles ; cer- 
tainly no man who ever came to understand them 
has once looked at his photograph of them without 
a puzzling sense of disappointment. It was a living 
woman with the breath of life betwee'n her lips of 
whom he made his sun-picture ; beneath the dull 
ruby of his dark room the film gives back the 
features of the dead. 

There is one matter I should like to make clear. 
Unwise admirers of the Taj have done her even 
more injustice than the camera. It is absurd to 
deny the professional architect his scope and 
privilege. There are defects, even grave defects, 
in the design, which sentimental souls are foolish 
to deny. They will not see that the fact that the 
expert is right in his criticisms does not make them 
wrong. It is inevitable that this antagonism should 
arise. Mechanical perfection has ever been a foe 
to a deeper lying charm. Salisbury Cathedral from 
end to end is perfect. There is no tampering with 
the clean-run homogeneity of the pile. The 
thirteenth century, the era beyond all others of 
English Gothic, bestowed its ripened genius upon 
the Minster of the Plain, and the church as it is to- 
day is that from which the loosened scaffolding 



86 UNDER THE SUN. 

fell away six centuries ago. But is it not common 
knowledge that Salisbury, from its very perfection, 
leaves the visitor dissatisfied and chilled. Man 
is not fit for such inhuman certainty, such skill 
infallible. 

The plate here given is a picture of a sweeper 
sweeping in a garden. It is true that the Taj 
makes his background, but that is how one should 
look at it. It is an old trick, well enough known 
to artists, but never more certain of its effect than 
here. The colour of the Taj, its mystery, its light- 
ness and its strength, are tenfold more to be under- 
stood when the eye does not directly challenge its 
beauty. The man who stands on the central 
marble cistern and makes his photograph deserves 
the failure which awaits him. 

Here at Agra the architectural excellence is not 
too wholly perfect for our poor human nature. Let 
us accept the artist's condemnation of the black 
marble *' pointing " between the white stones of 
the minarets ; let us admit that the minarets 
themselves were an experiment of doubtful success ; 
from the architect let the charge that the tomb 
is " all gateway " remain, if not exactly accepted, 
at any rate unanswered ; nay, one may even 
admit that from the standpoint of northern tastes 



AGRA. 87 

there is a regrettable sameness about the view 
from the four points of the compass. These 
are perfectly justifiable and even interesting 
comments, and it is silly to object to them. Per- 
haps Ustad Isa— or was it Verroneo or Austin de 
Bordeaux ? — would have made alterations him- 
self if he had had the work to do again, just as 
Ictinos confessed at Phigaleia for all the world to 
see the strange mistake he made in the matter 
of the frieze of the Parthenon. What, after all, 
do these mistakes matter, save that they bring 
the warm humanity of the Taj, its most intimate 
claim upon our love, a little nearer and a little 
dearer still into our hearts. Nay more, for all 
that distinguishes mankind from brutes on the 
one hand and successful business operators on the 
other, the Taj is touchstone supreme. You 
have but to pass through the red sandstone 
gateway, and look along the water garden to the 
place itself, and your first comment will tell us 
more about yourself than about the world-famous 
tomb. 

In the central cistern cool lotuses spread them- 
selves in plates of bronze and green at the water- 
level — a resting place for diamond-winged dragon 
flies, of scarlet or olivine ; beside them the wet 



88 UNDER THE SUN. 

rods of flowering rush spring up in a dainty faggot, 
tied where reality and reflection meet. A faint 
ripple of moving water throws a tangle of light 
upon the marble edge of conduits, that lead the 
eye continually between the jasmine and orange 
and all the scented undergrowth of an Indian 
garden, up to the haven where it would rest, and 
the dreamy translucence of the vast building 
floats in sunny silence, pearl-white against the 
pale ultramarine of the lower sky. 

If you look you will see between the trees a 
panel-sided platform of marble. It is twenty feet 
high, but it looks scarcely ten. Every side of it is 
a hundred yards long, but you will have to pace 
the distances to believe it. Upon the plinth the 
Taj itself rises, silver in the light and turquoise 
blue in the shadows. A great gateway lifts itself 
clear — too clear, alas ! — for the avenue of black- 
green cypress flambeaux is gone, and our grand- 
children alone may hope to see again this subtle 
and splendid glory of the gardens. On either side 
is a double-storeyed flank, so deeply recessed that 
its lines of pure marble seem less the main con- 
struction of the building than the white meshes 
of the rich blue mysteries of the eight arched 
openings that attend the gate. Above^ two clean 



fflHfnppRf^ 




AGRA. 89 

lotus-pointed cupolas rise, humble ministers to 
the sweUing purity of the great white dome, which 
crowns and recomposes all into harmony and 
peace. 

At each corner of the platform a tall minaret 
stands sentinel about the place where Mumtaz 
sleeps. On either side, across the marble court- 
yards on the right hand and on the left, the red 
guardian *' Question and Answer " mosques face 
inwards to the Taj. Careless they are of facing 
east or west. The ritual of Islam bows before the 
stress of human love, and through the solemn 
spaces of the tomb, to the dead ears of the Em- 
peror and his love, they cry aloud in eternal 
antiphon the greatness and the majesty of God. 
Beyond on the north, the Jumna circles past the 
white abutments, and all round rises the green 
foliage of trees and the heavy scent of jasmine 
and roses. 

Inside, in the gathered darkness behind the 
impenetrable walls of marble, barely relieved by 
their heavy latticed windows, a musical silence 
hovers beneath the dim vault whereunder the 
exquisite screen still guards the twin cenotaphs. 
The bodies of the lovers lie in the crypt below. 
In the obscurity one may well miss the quiet loveli- 



90 UNDER THE SUN. 

ness of this perforated and jewelled screen ; yet 
Austin de Bordeaux, thief and fugitive though he 
was, scamped never a leaf-veining or a chisel- 
touch as he inset grey purple spar beside a 
whorl of cream onyx, or sparingly laid a touch 
of raw emerald just where the green - ribbed 
agates of the fillet turn in their milky bed of 
Jaipur alabaster. And all this labour and love 
was bestowed where, so far as Austin could ever 
guess, only the occasional smoky glare of a red 
torch would ever reveal its beauties for a passing 
moment. 

Other buildings in the world have their own 
personal identity, their own attitude towards 
the ways and loves of men. St. Mark's challenges 
the inner lives of men, St. Peter's the crooking 
of their knees, the Pyramids confront the rising 
and the setting sun, the polestar and all the 
celestial company, Salisbury gazes coldly and very 
certainly upwards into heaven. The Taj Mahal 
alone crouches together, still huddled in loveliness 
and utter misery, crying only to be left alone with 
her dead. There is no front to the Taj ; go where 
you will, she turns away, and will have none of 
the world's consolation, its sympathy, or, worst 
of all, its admiration. Blind with her own tears. 



AGRA. 91 

she dwells apart, the spirit of love incarnate, 
realising to the bitter dregs the uselessness of 
raising jewelled homes of marble for the un- 
responsive dead. Arjumand is dead, is dead, and 
not all the wealth of him who never had an earthly 
rival in splendour can buy back one fleeting hour. 
It is misery made manifest. 

You will understand the Taj best if you will wait 
till the rosy fleeces have faded in the afterglow and 
the ripples of the Jumna run steel-grey in the 
waning light. A bird springs up, and the leaves 
of the thuia and the pepal murmur together as the 
darkness grows. A flying-fox with leathern wings 
wheels down from above, and a morrice of bats 
heralds the coming of the moon in the utter silence. 
And then you will understand that it does not 
matter whether you can still see the Taj or not. It 
is no question now of dome or gateway, silver work, 
or inlaid jewels. But as the dusk deepens you 
will come to know that the frail little body buried 
far down in its jewelled alabaster beside her faithful 
lord stands, and must always stand, for all that 
men hold dear or sacred in this world. However 
splendid and costly it may be, however renowned, 
however beautiful, the Taj itself is but an emblem 
and a symbol — so long as men and women love 



92 UNDER THE SUN. 

upon this earth, so long shall they go to the quiet 
garden beside the Jumna to lay their flowers in 
honour of Mumtaz alone, not of Ustad Isa, not of 
Shah Jehan, nor of another. For she loved and was 
much beloved. 



93 



Jammu. 



It was a swelteringly hot noonday, and Jammu 
had proved somewhat barren of interest except 
as a panorama from the Prime Minister's un- 
finished Anglo - Hindu - Kashmiri palace - villa on 
Ramnagar. The museum — which had its origin 
as a spacious house run up so recently before the 
visit of the present Emperor in 1875 that he wisely 
decided not to risk sleeping in the still wet, plastered 
rooms — was suffering, like many other things in 
India, from an energetic spring-cleaning and re- 
arrangement. So far only the necessary ordeal of 
dirt and a general state of locked-upness had been 
achieved, and the stag's-horn chandeliers of the 
verandah hardly repaid the trouble of the climb, 
though they had evidently impressed the khan- 
samah of the noble guest-house which here con- 
descends to act as a dak bungalow. The great 
temple was not without interest, and it was a 
source of mixed gratification to note that the costly 



94 QNDER THE SUN. 

compliment of a tomb with a gilded copper dome 
had been paid to the memory of shrewd old Golab 
Singh, who, in 1846, bought our interest in Jammu 
and Kashmir, lock, stock, and barrel, for half the 
price of a new hotel in Piccadilly. 

Once upon a time there seemed a chance that 
in sheer desperation and poverty Kashmir would 
have to be taken over again by the Indian Govern- 
ment, but this last chance of regaining control was 
thrown away when one Walter Lawrence was sent 
by the Viceroy to set the financial system of the 
country upon a better footing. For the reforms he 
instituted — one of the soundest pieces of finan- 
cial administration that India has known — not 
only set the twin States of Jammu and Kashmir 
on their legs again, but have resulted in such 
plethoric money-bags that the Maharaja's great 
brother, Sir Amar Singh, prime minister, com- 
mander-in-chief, and guardian tutelary of the terri- 
tories, hardly knows how to spend the accumulated 
revenues. But he is wisely spending them on 
railways, which solves the difficulty of the surplus 
for himself — and will probably double it for his 
successor. 

The palace is unimpressive — a large quadrangle 
with every side built in a different style. One is 



JAMMU. 95 

an erection, of no particular style, that sears the 
eye with its white-hot wash ; a second suggests 
Venice ; a third, departmental offices at Simla ; 
and the fourth is frankly inspired by the Victoria 
railway station at Bombay. There is a curious 
custom symbolised by a wooden cage in an open 
structure in the market-place. Into this a new 
Maharaja enters, almost on his hands and knees, 
to receive the tilak, or caste mark, from a priest, 
as a necessary prehminary to his full recognition as 
head of the State. It is only just to say that this 
statement was denied in toto by one elderly in- 
habitant of Jammu. Like Fuller of old, " the 
Writer intricated leave th all to the Last Day," — a 
necessity that is more frequent in India than the 
glib narratives of many good writers and experienced 
" qui hais " would suggest. However, there the 
wooden cage is, and it seems ill-adapted for any 
other use. 

The bazaar is indistinctive of anything. Babies, 
huge-cup-moulds of raw salt looking like pink 
sugar-candy ; the usual crimson-bearded Moham- 
medans of a certain age, which they are anxious 
to dissemble, the usual pirate bulls nosing about 
among the sellers of vegetable stuffs, a few hill 
sheep, which always suggest that a paper-fastener 



96 UNDER THE SUN. 

must be used to keep in its strained position the 
huge, fat, upturned tail of pink and wool. Nothing 
was remarkable in all this. An officer of the Im- 
perial Service troops and I wandered on, and then 
remembered a word of advice as we left the bun- 
galow. Someone on an official visit to the State 
authorities shouted after us : "Go and see the 
tigers, if you have time." We asked where the cage 
of tigers was, and we went to it. We found a 
strangely interesting thing, something, indeed, that 
seemed better fitted to belong to a new Jungle 
Book than to the serious region of fact. Yet the 
story is exactly true. It was so curious that we 
took some pains to verify it. 

We had been told that the Maharaja of Jammu 
possessed the finest male tiger kept in captivity 
anywhere in the world. This, I should say, is un- 
questionably true. Our informant might have 
added that his mate was the worst-tempered 
prisoner of any menagerie on earth. The cage in 
which these two are kept is a jerry-built erection 
of bricks and plaster. The iron bars are as thick 
as a little finger, and are inserted in the Tiortar 
between the bricks at the top. A good deal of the 
mortar has fallen, and, thanks to the anger of the 
lady inside, some more of it fell while we were 




■«^ 



JAMMU. 97 

looking on. It did not increase our sense of safety 
to notice that the bars do not reach to the bottom, 
but are held in place by two or three traverses of 
iron. The tiger, a glorious brute of white and 
orange and black, with steel sinews and teeth like 
Sikh daggers, lay sulkily in his cage and growled. 
The attendant was a man of whom some idea should 
be conceived. Five-foot four and thin, old and 
a little wasted in face, with a long, sparse beard of a 
hundred hairs stirring in the wind ; his eyes sunken, 
but looking straight into your own, with heavy 
bistred circles low on his cheek-bones, his puggary 
of white gauze falling deep on either side below 
his ears, and his almost toothless mouth stained 
with red catechu — he made up an ensemble 
that was still dignified, a man to the marrow. 
Indeed, he let us know that he was of the 
lordly race of Nadaun, long exiled from the 
Punjab, and forced to adopt the faith of Islam. 
As he spoke the tigress again and again flung 
herself furiously against the flimsy bars; white 
people maddened her especially it seemed. Her 
lord growled steadily, and drew in his breath with 
a bubbling sound. The keeper put his anatomy 
of a hand under his kothi and pulled out a little 
white bag. 

7 



98 UNDER THE SUN. 

Some years ago, Mangal — I suppose the pair 
had been trapped on a Tuesday — found that the 
Httle back-door of his den was open. The assistant 
of the Httle menagerie returned to find him loose 
in the garden, and fled incontinently. In half an 
hour Jammu's streets were as those of a dead city. 
One informant told us that the soldiers, especially, 
were on the roofs of the houses. Tired of inaction, 
Mangal stole out and glided silently down the main 
street of the town, a beautiful vision of orange and 
black striped death. No man hindered him, and 
he went down to the jungle beside the Tavi, and 
vanished. An hour afterwards the keeper came 
back to his work and heard the news. A few minutes 
later another solitary figure made its way down the 
still empty streets of Jammu, with bowed head, 
-beneath the glare of the sun. He had no weapon. 
Only, as he said, he had put on a leather coat to keep 
Mangal from scratching him. It was a touch that 
made the incident flash up before the eyes so in- 
stantly and truly that from a European it must have 
seemed an unpardonable touch of artistic affec- 
tation. He had his little white bag in his hand, 
and he went quietly down the deserted ways and 
was lost to sight in the jungle. An hour later he 
returned bare-headed in the sun. At his heels, 





Nadoun, keeper of the tigers, Jamniu. 



[Facing- page 



JAMMU. 99 

fawning and kittenish, slouched Mangal, and 
round the tiger's neck was loosely tied one end 
of Nadaun's white puggary. 

Will you try to reconstruct what the sight must 
have been ? Up over the hard hot cobbles and 
mud of the empty streets moved the pair. Nadaun, 
unhesitating and even-paced, never looking back, 
or varying the steady exchange of his thin legs, 
beneath the gaze of the thousands thronging the 
fiat roofs overhead, all in the utter silence of such 
excitement that the only sound heard was the 
mutter of the Tavi far in the valley below. Behind 
him, ludicrously leashed with the long, frail puggary, 
the silken-coated brute padded uncertainly with 
dripping mouth and bared teeth. It was the little 
white bag that had done it. 

" Would your honours like to see the effect of 
this medicine ? " Nadaun put his hand into the 
bag, and scattered a few whitish grains inside the 
bars. In a moment Mangal was upon them with 
a deep bass cough, and his great, rough, red tongue 
was searching out the tiniest scrap of whatever it 
was. In fifteen seconds he was yawning, and a 
slathering stream was dripping from his mouth. In 
thirty seconds he was on his back in the middle 
of the cell, wriggling from side to side, and beating 

L Of C. 7* 



loo UNDER THE SUN. 

the air with his huge paws, hke a kitten played 
with by a child. Nadaun put his arm in and pulled 
his whiskers. Mangal smiled fatuously, and pre- 
tended to bite. 

This is actually what happened. It is difficult 
to explain the reason. Nadaun very naturally 
refused to allow us to look closely at the powder. It 
was his livelihood, he said, and his secret, if our 
honours would pardon him, must be kept. Probably 
valerian enters into the compound, but it is difficult 
to suggest any drug that could have so immediate 
a result. A few grains were given to the tigress 
also ; the effect upon her was as much more 
striking, as she had been more furious but a minute 
before. 

It was all very odd, and the main street took on 
a new interest as we went back past the long 
caravans of bullock carts, which were even then 
slowly carrying out the innumerable necessities and 
furniture destined for the camp at Satwari, which 
was to be used by the Prince of Wales during his 
brief stay at Jammu. What a camp that was ! 
Electricity everywhere, and the humblest tent 
lined with Kashmiri embroideries and shawls, A 
stream had been deflected to make for beauty in the 
garden of the camp. Not for drinking, mark you ; 



JAMMU. loi 

it will scarcely be believed, but the very cows which 
provided milk for the camp had, for six weeks 
beforehand, been watered with boiled and filtered 
water, and the bathrooms were supplied with the 
same somewhat luxurious liquid. 

As we returned, at the gate of the bungalow 
the guard of honour, provided for the Maharaja on 
the occasion of his state visit to the Resident, six- 
footers every man, swung past us to the skirl of 
the pipes, beneath their colours of crimson and 
gold, with Lakshmi dancing decorously in the 
middle. 



102 



Calcutta. 



The last few hours of the journey from the west 
into Calcutta are as interesting as any that railway 
travel in India can give us. The low, fiat, water- 
sodden delta of the Ganges stretches out to the 
horizon, but so great is the wealth of vegetation 
that twenty yards is often as far as one can see, 
except where some reedy bank, flaming with 
patches of rose lotus, opens out between the cocoa- 
nuts, teaks, and bananas that continually shut in 
the view with their half-translucent green curtain. 
Everything is rank in growth and rich in colour 
In the early morning the mere telegraph wires are 
curves of hanging diamonds ; the dripping morning 
dew has fringed every leaf with its own jewels, 
and the very sleepers of the railway flash with 
white fire as the sun strikes uncertainly between 
the foliage of the virgin jungle. Here and there 
an abandoned hut is almost hidden in the folds of 
the yellow karela upon its roof-tree, or of the up- 



CALCUTTA. 103 

springing pampas or datura beside its falling walls ; 
here and there the jungle-overgrown house of some 
old Frenchman pretends that it is a human habita- 
tion stilly and the crazy door-jambs and fungused 
lintels stand away under the bulging weight of their 
red bricks above. Chinsurah and Chandernagore 
are passed. For the former we exchanged Sumatra 
— no small price ; the great pink palace, almost 
abutting on the railway station of the latter, has 
the picturesque but wholly unjust reputation of 
having been built as a haven of refuge by an 
absconding debtor from Calcutta, who found a per- 
manent home among the easy-going Frenchmen in 
this fever-ridden place. As a matter of fact, there 
is little here of romance ; the arm of the English 
is long, and the French do not care to have 
their scanty acres clogged with those who 
have left Calcutta for Calcutta's good. For on 
many days the reek of the long-drawn veil of 
smoke that always hems in their southern horizon 
can be smelled, so near is the metropolis of 
India. 

The train comes into the Howrah terminus on 
the western bank of the Hugh, and the bridge, 
almost as famous and as cosmopolitan as that of 
Pera, has to be crossed. On the left is the sacred 



104 UNDER THE SUN. 

ghat, where devotees assembled to bathe before 
even Job Charnock, of questionable fame, came up 
from Madras hunting for leave to set up a factory 
and a few square acres on which to build it. 
Aurangzeb the Magnificent gave him a piece of 
land at Sutanati in 1690. The pleasant imaginings 
of writers have taken such hold that it is firmly- 
believed in Calcutta that he landed at Boytakhana 
Bazar, and sat down under the pipal to ruminate 
upon the future greatness of this fever-ridden 
swamp. As a matter of fact, there were English 
already at Sutanati, which is the modern Rathtola 
Ghat, and Charnock's chief service to the State 
lay rather in his iron character than in his morals 
or in his foresight. For it is generally conceded 
now that Calcutta, built upon a stagnant swamp, 
painfully reclaimed from the crumbling alluvial 
drift of the Ganges, has attained her high position 
in despite of, rather than as a result of, any pro- 
phetic value attaching to this choice. For example, 
there is to-day a grave uncertainty whether the 
subsoil of the Maidan is able to support the Victoria 
Memorial Hall which is to be built in the middle 
of the large public park, in the heart of Calcutta. 
This will explain perhaps the enormous expense 
which has been incurred by seven generations of 



CALCUTTA. 105 

men in turning " Sutanati "jr into the second city 
of the Empire. 

Flat and well-metalled roadways of great width 
skirt by the maidan or dive through the many- 
storeyed buildings of Calcutta. Electric light and 
electric tramways put the richest parts of London 
to shame. Shops that are barely less in size and 
importance than their namesakes in England^line 
the better-known streets, and houses encircled by 
well- tended gardens form suburbs that keep up 
the tradition of luxury that Hastings well under- 
stood and Macaulay accepted. If the buildings 
are not as eye-compelling as those of Bombay, it is 
only because the inhabitants have hesitated to 
accept the architecture with which the Western 
metropolis has unfortunately been content ; they 
are no less commodious, and one day will be rebuilt 
with a permanence better deserved than that of the 
best Parsi-Gothic of Bombay. 

Yet Calcutta is a dull town. It is flat and un- 
lovely from end to end. There is never a corner to 
be turned in it which lets in a new scene. The 
bazaars are duller than any others in Hindustan. 
Except for the collector of the relics of John 
Company — Chippendale chairs, French mirrors, or 
Sheffield plate — there is little of art in them which 



io6 UNDER THE SUN. 

cannot be better bought elsewhere, and even at her 
best the midday sun can find nothing in all her 
borders to arrest the eye and little enough to chain 
the imagination. The Black Hole ? Yes, it has been 
contingently re-discovered. The Government offi- 
cial has his faith fixed for him by a marble tablet 
and a good-intentioned reservation by Dalhousie 
Square. But the railed-off marble floor does not 
help a visitor much to re-construct the famous cellar, 
and, besides, the full space is partly covered by the 
high and ornate red walls of the new post-office. 
Moreover, there are so-called experts who deny its 
authenticity, and would place the original site of 
the Hole on the other side of the post-office. 

There is also a tablet to Job Charnock in the 
garden of the old cathedral, and another to William 
Hamilton, who vindicated the chartered rights 
of the East India Company when threatened 
by the feeble and wastrel successors of the Great 
Moguls. But Madras is the real centre of this 
early and tentative British enterprise, and there 
is more human interest in the bare registers or 
Yale's communion plate in Fort St. George than in 
all that remains of our first occupation and tribu- 
lation in Calcutta. Of the splendour of bygone 
India there is naturally not a vestige. 



CALCUTTA. 107 

But Calcutta has one unfailing charm of its own 
— the sunset glories of the *' Hugh." It is not of 
her own making, except so far as her own peculiar 
dirtiness has contributed to the sight, but you 
may always find it if you will walk or drive out as 
the day wanes. The day-long smoke-coils from the 
vomiting chimneys of Howrah and Calcutta have 
died down, and the rich brown sediment of the sky 
lies in the now windless air between the city and 
the nobilit}^ of the western sky. The flat expanse 
of the maidan runs unchecked in the dusk to the 
very water's edge, where the ocean-going steamers 
lie, and from it the reflected brown-crimson 
splendours of the horizon and the orange and gold 
gradations which lead up to the faint purples and 
steely blues of the zenith are seen with all the 
unique enhancement of webbed black masts and 
silhouetted rigging. The tints mount and recede, 
Government House in the distance takes on a rich 
orange, and behind you Fort William stands out one 
moment in sepia before it falls away in the encroach- 
ing tide of evening lavender. The lights of the 
long string of carriages come out, and the scene is 
over. Short as it is, the sunset remains the most 
beautiful thing in the metropolis of India. No- 
where else in the world do river scenery and the fog 



io8 UNDER THE SUN. 

of a manufacturing town close in such a vista of 
long grey-green swathes of grass edging quite up 
to ocean steamers of ten thousand tons, and ringed 
about with the great suggestions of a city. 

From nowhere does one see the city itself ; it lies 
in the background, stalking the visitor now and then 
from behind the vista of a street or the smoke of 
many chimneys, but never asserting itself as a 
tangible thing. Once I went round Calcutta by 
night. The Thagi and Dacoity Department lent me 
a man and gave me three hours of unguessable ex- 
periences. But it is not an expedition that it is 
easy for a visitor to make, and the strange glimpses 
of the Arabian Nights, of scenes from Port Said 
dancing-rooms, or of night-gambling in the cafes 
of Constantinople, rich and varied as they were, 
were foreign, too, and of necessity hid themselves 
strangely and securely in this modern ugly town, 
where nothing counts but the chances of making 
oneself wealthy or the hope of leaving it for ever. 
Sentiment — and I could almost add religion of 
every kind — has been reduced here to a subordina- 
tion, that is a queer contradiction of the under- 
lying superstition of most of the races that make up 
the population. 

Socially Calcutta provides a few pleasant weeks 



CALCUTTA. 109 

in the year ; the work of Government routine is 
carried on here during the cold weather — ^what else 
is there left to say of her ? Little enough. It is 
a notable thing that she has ousted no other one 
of the natural capitals of India. She provides, 
indeed, a happy hunting-ground for the rabbit- 
hearted sedition of some sections of the Bengalis, 
but with that political achievement she is fain to 
rest. What Calcutta says few men care to know, 
in spite of the vast wealth that annually pours 
through her as the clearing-house of the Gulf of 
Bengal. There is much that is worthy of Calcutta 
done within her — nothing that is worthy of the 
capital of India. The Army and Navy Stores re- 
main as the symbol of Calcutta. It is a place where 
one can buy cheap European goods pleasantly and 
from a fair range of choice ; one's hair is cut better 
in Calcutta than elsewhere. The Bengal Club is the 
best in Asia. One remembers pleasant evenings as 
one passes through — passes through. There, per- 
haps, the truth lies. Little as any part of India can 
be called the permanent home of any European, 
Calcutta is the place beyond all others of which it is 
true that in the counting-house, as in the streets and 
law courts, in the pettiest flat as in the houses of 
the councillors, every white man and white woman 



no UNDER THE SUN. 

is at the same task, counting the very hours till 
the days of his exile be past and done, and he shall 
be able to shake the dirt of Calcutta from his feet 
and her memory from his mind for ever. 

Yet he keeps grim hold of his inheritance for his 
sons' sake, and hereby is the strength of English 
work abroad. Verily Calcutta is a great city in 
spite of itself. 



Ill 



Darjiling. 



The road cut out of the mountain side turns a 
corner and the last sight of human habitation 
vanishes. You may sHp down a few yards on to 
a projecting ledge of rock to get out of the way of 
the dust that is kicked up by the bullocks as they 
pass. There is no beast living that shuffles up 
so much dust as the common bullock. It would 
be a curious point for Darwin to have decided. 
I suppose that oxen only flourished where there 
was a certain amount of good and probably rather 
short vegetation, so that it did not matter much 
whether as he walked the beast dragged his 
feet. Camels have long learned the wisdom of 
planting their feet and picking them up again 
neatly, however fast they may be travelhng ; and 
an elephant's experience in the long jungle grass 
may have taught him his Agag-like methods of 
progression. Certainly bullocks were never in- 
tended by their Creator for work in the loose dust 



112 UNDER THE SUN. 

of an Indian-made road. Draught bullocks in the 
East are generally shod. The great white oxen 
which draw the gold and silver guns of Patiala are, 
I believe, shod each beast with his corresponding 
metal ; but it must be a poor alloy of gold that is 
hard enough to stand such work. Here on the 
grassy ledge we are away from the wayside dust 
which hangs so heavily on every leaf, and turns to 
a dull, universal eucalyptus grey the richest greens 
beside the Himalaya roads. The matted bents 
mask the steep ana uncertain edges of the little 
plateau. Here, at a height of seven thousand 
feet above the sea, an almost English climate 
modifies considerably the trees and flowers round 
us, but it is chiefly in the manner of intro- 
ducing hardier specimens than in entirely cutting 
out the tropical vegetation which has rustled past 
the carriages of the little toy railway that climbs 
up from Siliguri. Over there is a reddening patch 
of barberry beneath a camelia, just such a clump 
as adds a note of colour to a path at Belvoir ; over 
it, incongruous but flourishing, is a tree-fern with 
its witch-mantle of last year's brown dead foliage. 
A little farther there is a canary tree growing by 
the side of the path, and streamers of white orchid 
fall from it. It is too common here to attract 



DARJILING. 113 

much notice, and long grey lichens, like seaweed, 
drip from the upper branches. Yaktail grasses 
throw up fountains of white feathery bents in 
between the dark reddish and amber-coloured rocks. 
A couple of Tibetans pass slowly up ; one, I sup- 
pose, is a woman, as her hair is done in two pigtails 
instead of one, and a flash of fleur-de-lys turquoise 
marks her ear, but it is difficult to see clearly, and 
there is nothing else in the dress to distinguish one 
from the other. Their cheeks are swollen with ^ 
lumps of cheese, and their cloth-topped boots of 
half-raw hide are white with dust. The man is 
carrying a prayer-wheel, and as he walks he keeps 
time with the chained weight. He murmurs the 
eternal Tibetan formula as he goes, but the syllables 
are all lost in a low hum. There is a cheerful 
trickle of water from the split bamboo runnel 
beside the path, and his companion stops to drink, 
boldly putting her mouth to the slant cut edge 
of the half-pipe. It is pleasant to be so far 
removed from the caste prejudices of India, where, 
even at a wayside railway station, the boy who 
doles out the water must be a Brahmin, and 
those whom he serves must never dare touch the 
lip of the pitcher. There is a slight scent of in- 
cense in the air. It is, I suppose, some unseen 

8 



114 UNDER THE SUN. 

plant of humia, but it harmonises pleasantly with 
the two stumpy figures muffled in thick dirty 
crimson cloth. They pass on their way and vanish, 
and the only thing which still moves in the hot air 
is the slant of some zig-zagging butterfly. You 
crush a bed of ferns as you sit down and look out 
over the abyss to the north. 

Darjiling has many practical advantages. It is 
the hot- weather station for the Bengal Govern- 
ment, and therefore the resort also of such Calcutta 
society as cannot go to Simla. It is a healthy 
sanatorium for troops, and, besides, has a certain 
strategic and commercial importance because the 
roads that run through Sikkim to Tibet converge 
at the Tista bridge. As the road that runs beside 
the Tista falls into the river for six months in each 
year the Lepchas and Paharias find it, as a rule, 
safer to make their way up again through Pashok 
and the tea gardens to Darjiling, instead of tramp- 
ing on beside the cold snow-curdled stream and 
through the ' sal ' forest to Siliguri. They have 
little eye for natural scenery. But the one claim 
that Darjiling boasts which will remain in the 
mind of those who visit her, is that from this moun- 
tain side on which you are now sitting there is to be 
seen beyond all cavil or rivalry, the finest view that 



DARJILING. lis 

exists on this earth. It is generally a waste of 

time, and always a thankless task, to attempt to 

describe a view. Nothing, unless indeed one has 

the pen of a Ruskin, can bring home to the reader 

more than a mere ghost of the charm of any land* 

scape. Yet if but one or two may thus be induced 

to take the risk — and a risk it is — and make the 

journey from Calcutta, it will have been worth 

while to say a few words. There is always the 

chance and often the certainty of cloudy weather, 

and many of Darjiling's visitors go back home 

without having seen this crowning glory of India. 

But such an evening as this would make amends 

for many days wasted here by even the busiest of 

globe-trotters. 

Far beneath one, the mountain-side falls almost 

perpendicularly, though, were you to drop from 

the little plateau, you would be caught at once 

in the rich vegetation that springs wherever a 

seed can obtain roothold on a ledge or in a cleft. 

Three thousand feet below, the valley stretches 

out ten miles wide from the foot of the precipice. 

At this distance it is difficult to see much of the 

detail of the landscape, though one realises that, 

after all, there has not been entirely lost the last sign 

of the presence of man. Lost in the tangle of a 

8* 



ti6 UNDER THE SUN. 

little wood there is the flash of a white wall, whichj 
I believCj indicates an isolated mission station. 
As the crow flies it must be four or five miles 
away — half lost in the unkempt patches of jungle 
which still dispute possession with the tea-fields. 
At this distance the tea plantations show only as 
regular patches of even green, more like stretches 
of turf than what they really are. Beyond them, 
the valley seems to end against a mountain side 
which is probably Hke that on which you sit, 
though even in this clear air every detail is at 
this great distance hazed about with blue. In 
itself this view would make the reputation of 
many a mountain eyrie in Europe, but it is the 
way in which the walls of the Himalayas close the 
panorama with a thousand deeply-cut ravines that 
lends contrast and gives it a particular beauty in 
the distance. Above the projection of lower cliffs, 
which seems to stop with curious suddenness, comes 
a great mass of treeless rock, indigo and ash blue, 
in the fading light. As the eye travels upwards 
to a point far higher than that on which you sit, 
the first outposts of the glacier ice-field are dimly 
seen thrusting themselves in between the pinnacles 
and curtains of rock Still the eye mounts, and at 
last the waste of Himalayan ice crowns the scene. 



DARJILING. 117 

Even to this distance, twenty miles away, the 
frozen and untrodden wilderness throws its in- 
fluence. The awful cold and silence of that blue- 
shadowed desert of cavernous white ice chills you 
as you watch. Rarely indeed does some projecting 
point of grey rock break up through it, though 
here and there at its edges it washes in cold hum- 
mocks up against the stark granite walls of the 
mountain range, so steep that neither snow nor 
ice can rest upon them. There is a lavender haze 
over it in which details of ice-field and dark rock 
ahke are at last lost. It is a view that cannot be 
paralleled on earth, and the satisfied eye ranges 
downwards again, perhaps traversing with the quick- 
ness of thought the aching distances that stretch 
between the little mission building and the grey 
distance of the crowning sky. You may well be 
satisfied with this, and if the day be a little overcast 
you will go away from Darjiling, feeling that in 
this contrast of the tropics and of the eternal ice, 
3^ou have seen something that you will never 
forget. 

But this evening, the light mists that over the 
valley hung balanced in the void have risen, and you 
will see something more, and as you look you 
will hardly believe that you have really seen it. 



ii8 UNDER THE SUN. 

Up above the grey lavender sky that crowns the 
glacier-field, up in mid-heaven, up where, by rights 
there should be nothing but the night riding stars 
and constellations, separate, detached, uncon- 
nected with anything on earth, there rise in mid- 
heaven the rose-pink ice peaks of Kinchinjunga. 
Fifty miles away, yet clearer than the glacier- 
field below them, the crannies and clefts, the chairs 
and pinnacles of Kinchinjunga stand out in pale 
crimson glory across the lavender sky, more like 
some heavenly vision of an old painter than any- 
thing that can possibly be real in this world. 
Motionless, silent, ethereal, these untrodden peaks 
of mystery defy for ever the trespassing foot of 
man's curiosity. They hold the colour just as 
a great ocean shell of the South Seas glows daintily 
with twenty shades of pink. For us the sun is 
now set, but for ten minutes you may still watch 
from the thickening ash grey shadows of your 
mountain coign the set scene, immovably fixed 
for all the interplay of fading rose. Then Kinchin- 
junga dies out again, and only the dark starless 
patch in the patined sky will tell you all night that 
what you have seen is no mere vision or delusion. 



119 



P ur i. 



If there is one thing more than another which 
recalls the earliest conception which childhood ever 
acquired of the mysteries of India, I suppose it is 
the word Jaganath. I remember a volume of 
Tenniel's cartoons, in one of which there was a 
gruesome picture of the famous car being dragged 
along by a thousand men, while from under its 
tyres there lengthened a ghastly avenue of crushed 
and mutilated figures. In those days, before the 
relentless Hunter came, we used to spell it Jugger- 
naut, but the pronunciation is the same, and the 
thing is the same. Why the car of Jaganath 
should in particular have been credited with man- 
slaying qualities I do not know ; certain it is that 
there is a fine car in the temple at Puri which is 
regularly used, and no doubt there must always be a 
number of willing martyrs within the ranks of 
every religion, but I am inclined to think that the 
sheer difficulty of maintaining a foothold while five 



I20 UNDER THE SUN. 

hundred men are struggling round one to help 
in pulling forward the ungainly vehicle accounts 
for most, if not all, of the lives lost beneath the 
wheels of the car. This is prosaic, but the truth 
generally is. It is worth while to go to Puri and 
see the Temple of Jaganath. It is only a little more 
than a night's run from Calcutta, and it is one of 
the prettiest places in all India. You can go by 
sea if you like, but the railway now runs from 
Khurda Road to Puri, and the roadstead is unsafe 
for vessels in even the slightest gale. 

As you get out at Puri you will find the same 
chattering crush of natives intent upon their own 
business — on the whole, a law-abiding mob. If you 
are wise you will at once seize one of the rickety 
little carriages and drive off through the sand of the 
roads to the bungalow. If you are a great person 
the Viceroy's private secretary will probably have 
invited you to make use of the official Circuit 
House during your stay at Puri. As a rule in 
India, an official residence is to be preferred to a 
dak bungalow, but in this case the two are side by 
side, and it is impossible to imagine a pleasanter 
little five-roomed house than the bungalow at Puri. 
It is built lowg down upon the seashore. In 
winter the returning monsoon must dash the spray 



PURL 121 

against the very walls and windows of this little 
house of rest. 

As I sit here and write, the long soft thunder 
of the sea croons eternally in the ear, and on either 
side the white rolling sand dunes, lightly scattered 
with green grass and crowned by the blue line of 
the dimpling sea, run south and north, this till it 
is hidden by the Circuit House, that till it is 
lost in a little venturesome wood of stunted 
casuarinas. The cool sea-breeze is wafted into 
the room — a pleasant change, indeed, from the hot 
and dust-laden airs that swirled and scattered the 
dust but yesterday in Calcutta streets. One can 
go out and watch the incoming waves. There are 
three things that men can look at together without 
feeling the need of speech, yea, four things that 
lull our human desire always to be talking. The 
rise and splash of the fountain, the lick and play 
of the flame above the tinkling red core of a coal 
fire, the roll-over and " lick-o'-the-lips " of a flag, 
and the lazy nonchalance and gather-and-fall 
of green waves at the seaside. What is the common 
source of quiet sympathy in each ? A lazy and 
recurrent motion ; but why that should have the 
effect it does is not easily explained. Why, that is, 
two men should be able to sit and smoke in silence 



122 UNDER THE SUN. 

before a iire and not before an empty grate remains 
a mystery. 

There are not many places in India where you 
can watch the waves swarming in upon the beach. 
At Bombay you may see the big western rollers 
smash themselves into white jewels upon the rocks 
that guard the end of Malabar Point, but of sand or 
gravel there is none. No one ever yet went to 
Diamond Harbour except for the purpose of getting 
away from it as soon as possible. Cochin is a 
sea backwater, where little three-inch waves 
splutter and fuss along the three-foot rockery that 
protects the Residency lawn. Quilon is all bare 
rock, relieved here and there by little enclosed 
slopes of white sand. Of all the better known 
places of India, at Puri and Madras alone can one 
sit on the shore and watch the familiar English 
habits of the oldest of our friends — the sea. There 
is something of home-sickness in the lift and the 
poise and the crash and the spread in the mono- 
tonous yet infinite variety of the green fresh waves 
of the Bay of Bengal, and the white lace which 
slips down the inner slope of the green wave was 
surely woven by sea maidens of the Dorsetshire 
coast. One hundred yards out the incoming 
combers fret themselves upon a sandy shallow, 



PURL 123 

and a momentary flash of white crests the edge of a 
breaking shell of yellow. I daresay the sand-bank 
can be seen at low tide. There is a well on the 
beach fifty yards from the bungalow, and better 
water is not drawn in India. I remember a man's 
story of how, off Muscat, in the Persian Gulf, sailors 
obtain fresh water in the middle of the sea by 
letting down bottles to fill themselves at the bottom, 
where a mighty spring hurls itself up into the brine. 
I daresay it is true. As a rule the Eastern tales which 
seem most false are the truest, the likelv ones are 
the lies. Anyway, Tavernier has something like it. 
You can walk over the sands to the great temple. 
There is a stretch of perhaps six hundred yards of 
raw fat -leaved marine plants and sandy casuarina 
trees before you defile through a little street of 
flat-roofed dilapidated mud-cottages with mongrel 
dogs alive with mange snarling or sleeping in the 
sun, and reach at last the great open space in 
front of the temple. On either side of you the 
great twenty-foot wall stretches with its Ghibelline 
battlements, two hundred and fifty yards perhaps 
in length. Up against it are huddled innumerable 
little shops and shanties. In the centre, thrown 
forward twenty yards, is the famous black pillar. 
This is one of the most beautifully worked things 



124 UNDER THE SUN. 

in India. From a plinth of half a dozen courses, 
beautifully recessed and diapered with a pattern 
of conventional beasts and ornament, rises the 
thirty-foot shaft of fluted black marble, terminated 
by a plain capital almost Doric in its simplicity, 
whereon a tiny figure of the Dawn sits all uncon- 
scious of the ludicrous disproportion between 
itself and its majestic pedestal. Immediately 
behind it is the great gate of the temple itself, 
flanked on either side with somewhat substantial 
houses. You may go up to the gate if you like, 
but no white man, living or dead, has ever gone 
through it. Even Lord Curzon, who, for half 
a dozen reasons, had a better claim than anyone 
else, and who had made a journey from Calcutta 
specially to see the interior of the temple, was 
politely but firmly refused admission. Nay, more 
extraordinary still, the Grand Lama of Tashi- 
Lhunpo, the living reincarnation of the very 
Buddha, of Him who was, according to the later 
Hindu faith, no less than the ninth and latest 
manifestation of Vishnu himself, was this year 
privately warned that he would not be allowed 
within the gates of Vishnu's greatest shrine. 
This is all very mysterious. Moreover, you will 
hardly get a consistent g-ccount of the temple 



PURL 125 

interior even from a native who has repeatedly- 
visited it. 

Of one thing there is no doubt whatever^ and for 
this reason alone the temple of Jaganath at Puri 
has an interest and a significance which attach 
to no other spot in India. The rules of caste in 
India are more binding far than the laws of the 
Medes and the Persians. Even a globe-trotter 
can hardly fail to notice, in his butterfly zigzags 
about this country, that time and civilisation 
have not relaxed in the slightest degree the stern 
and unbending rules which separate, in life and 
in death, the members of one caste from those 
of even the next above it or the next below. His 
attention will probably be called to it first by his 
bearer's incomprehensible explanation of why he 
could not obtain his food at a certain place, and 
his demand of half a day's hohday that he may 
tramp a mile to buy or eat among his own people. 
Nay, the truth is that the spread of civilisation has 
rather tightened than relaxed these relentless bands, 
though missionaries are loath to admit it. For 
with civilisation snobbishness ever walks hand in 
hand ; and, incongruous though it may seem, the 
chief manner in which we have affected Indian 
domestic relations is by fostering an increase, not 



126 UNDER THE SUN. 

a decrease^ of their social distinctions. We have 
encouraged even the lowest in caste to hope for 
some token of social distinction, some precedence 
which fifty years ago was undreamed of. The seed 
thus sown has borne strange fruit far outside the 
administrative and military services. We have 
introduced snobbishness into the East. The easiest 
way in India for a man to claim a status one degree 
higher than that to which he has a right, is by 
observing regulations, both positive and negative, 
from which, as a member of the lower caste, he had 
been hitherto exempt. From one end of India to 
the other there has been of late years a noticeable 
willingness on the part of a lower caste to suffer the 
disabilities of one somewhat higher in the scale.* 
Enormous sums of money have been given by 
wealthy low-caste Madrassis for a fleeting associa- 
tion with a Brahmin. 

Now in Puri all caste vanishes. 

The significance of this can be understood only 
by those who know India. This absolute reversal 
of all that is most sacred to India gives to Puri a 



* We may smile at the social ambitions of the guileless native but it after all 
is the same all the world over, even among the professionally unworldly classes. 
There are few bishops of the Church of Rome who are to-day content to display 
a hat with six tassels, and few archbishops who do not claim the fifteen which by 
right should be borne by a Cardinal alone. 



PURL 127 

meaning which will, perhaps, never be wholly 
understood by any European. In Southern India 
there is indeed something a little like it. Once a 
year, during a festival — a spring festival, which 
corresponds roughly with the Saturnaha of ancient 
Rome, with certain curiously indecent rites — caste 
is also forgotten for the night. But here in Puri 
we have a place where, year in and year out, this 
extraordinary religious socialism is not merely 
tolerated but an imperative custom. Nothing can 
be more significant than the fact that the guardian 
and head of this most hoty Hindu temple is the 
Raja of Khurda, who, by hereditary and inevi- 
table descent, is a sweeper, the lowest of the recog- 
nised castes. 

The story of the founding of the Temple of 
Jaganath is odd. Once upon a time, in the days 
of Indra-mena, King of Orissa, he was told to go 
to the seashore at Puri, and there dig for the long 
lost temple of Vishnu. It was buried nine miles 
deep in the sand of the shore. He found it, how- 
ever, and then covered it up again. This he must 
have done with regret as the temple was made of 
solid gold. Instead, he built the present temple, 
and when it was finished Vishnu himself in the form 
of a log was washed ashore according to promise. 



128 UNDER THE SUN. 

Then Visvakarmaj the Divine Fashioner, was sent 
for, to carve the log into the semblance of the god. 
This he consented to do on condition that no one 
watched him at work. Indra-mena, however, could 
not overcome the temptation and peeped in through 
the chink of a door. So Visvakarma re-packed his 
tool-bag and went away in a huff, Divine Fashioner 
though he was, and that is the reason why the 
image was never finished. If you do not believe it, 
you can go to the tank and ask the world-old turtle 
that helped Indra-mena and still expects offerings. 

Once a year this extraordinary, rudely-hacked 
log is carried in procession to the Garden House 
upon the famous car, which is thirty-five feet 
square and runs upon sixteen wheels. Over four 
thousand men pull at the ropes, and smaller 
cars follow after with similarly crude representa- 
tions of the brother and sister of Jaganath. The 
road along which the car passes is a wide thorough- 
fare, which is completely full with pilgrims upon 
this annual ceremony. The Garden House, to 
which the idols are then taken, is a, building orna- 
mented in a manner of which Exeter Hall would 
not approve. There are a score of other holy 
festivals in the year, all of which are connected 
with this ugly log. The most famous is perhaps 








The Temple of Jaganath, Puri. 



\_Facing page 128. 



PURL 129 

that upon which the three images are ceremonially 
bathed within the temple. After this they are 
dressed in splendid robes such as are traditionally 
ascribed to Rama, and elephants' trunks are 
attached to their faces. This is probably an 
ascription of wisdom to Jaganath, but even the most 
learned pundits are at a loss to explain many of the 
ceremonies connected with Puri. The truth is 
that the more intelHgent Brahmins are well aware 
of the inconsistencies and follies of many of their 
traditions, and those who know the Hindu rehgion 
best will be the first to admit that satisfactory infor- 
mation as to the origin of many of its ceremonies 
has long ceased to be forthcoming in India. 

There is little doubt that the curious connection 
of Buddhism with the worship of Vishnu to which 
I have referred is responsible for some at least of the 
anomalies. The swastika and the conch, both in- 
timately connected with Northern Buddhism, are 
prominent ornaments upon the outer walls of the 
temple, and it is said that the car festival is a 
commemoration of Buddha's birthday. 

All round the central square of the town — 
that is, the space in the centre of which the 
temple is placed — there are quarters for different 
trades. To the left of the main entrance you may 

9 



130 UNDER THE SUN. 

buy saris. On the northern side, to the east, are 
the fruit-sellers, and to the west are the makers 
of brass pots. Opposite the west wall of the temple 
is a three-storied house from which a fairly good 
view may be had of what lies within the forbidden 
exterior wall. 

The central spire of the temple of Jaganath rises 
to a height of one hundred and ninety-two feet ; 
an estimate which includes the great wheel-finial 
of Vishnu, which is obviously nothing else than 
Buddha's Wheel of the Law. It is said to be nearly 
nine hundred years old, and this may be true of 
the interior of the temple, but it is clear at a glance 
that the hand of the restorer has played havoc 
with the gates and surface- decorations throughout. 
It is not uninteresting to remember that within 
this great edifice there still go on ceremonies and 
services in honour of the deity which, it is suffi- 
ciently well known, for primitive indecency and 
unrestrained orgies far surpass anything else in 
Indian temples of which rumour tells. But nothing 
is ever known outside the walls of the temple. 
You may hear from time to time the long-drawn 
scream of a brass trumpet or the continual sodden 
thumping of a drum, but that is all. Never is there 
a sign outside the walls of this thrice holy shrine of 



PURL 131 

anything but the usual crowding and chattering 
groups or counter-streams of native workers or 
loafers which thicken as the afternoon wears on^ and 
news of the trivial events of the day are exchanged 
in the market-place. So, after you have looked at 
all that you may see, you will be glad enough to go 
back to the bungalow and sit out the sunset. For 
temples are plentiful and gods are many; but this 
little beach where the wavelets tumble will give 
you a touch of England that is rare indeed in 
India. 




The Image of Jaganath, 
by a Native Artist. 



9* 



132 



Rangoon. 



Burma sends her scouts far afield. Long before 
Cape Negrais comes in sight the dull, opaque green 
of the sea betrays, as surely as ever did the floating 
vegetation of the Caribbean Sea to Columbus, the 
near presence of one of the huge mud-saturated 
streams of the world. The dark, almost black, 
carpet that all the way from Calcutta has streamed 
and swirled and clouded into aquamarine beside 
our prow, now deepens into olive and runs through 
all the gamut of embrowning green till the last 
suggestion of fair water is lost in a flood more 
turbid than ever poured out seawards between the 
sterlings of London Bridge. So heavily charged 
with alluvial deposits is the water of this great 
sea-arm, that an ordinary bath on board ship in 
the Gulf of Martaban is out of the question. In 
this domestic way one is prepared for the long flat 
delta of the Irrawaddy, backed, in the far distance, 
by the violet combings of its southward trending 




A Burmese monastery. 



[Facing page 132. 



Ry\NGOON. 133 

ranges. Rangoon lies some hours upstream, and 
up against the turbid yellow flood the steamer ' 
ploughs for half a morning, doubling and redoub- 
ling again and again upon its course. 

It is a dull landscape, and one notices the more 
readily, now far away to starboard, now almost 
at the port beam, now straight ahead, a little white 
flame like that of an oil lamp. Except the scrub 
that comes down to the river banks and a few 
stranded settlements of trees that here and there 
group themselves around a crumbling pagoda, 
there is no other object in all the horizon. Three 
hours before Rangoon is reached the tiny argent 
tongue teases the horizon, quivering gently in the 
sun and the rippling mirage ; little by little the jet 
of light resolves itself into a flame of steady gold, 
and at last it rises before us clear to view, a glitter- 
ing peak, five hundred feet above the river level, 
springing clear from the centre of the crowded busy 
town and smoking chimneys of Rangoon. It 
dominates the capital and everything around it 
for fifty miles ; it is Rangoon itself ; it is southern 
Buddhism ; it is the most picturesque thing in all 
the East, and until you go you will have eyes for 
nothing else. It is the Shwe Dagon. 

The gulls follow us up the river as we churn 



134 UNDER THE SUN. 

through the thickening mud ; they flap behind us 
on wings too strong for their httle cigar-Uke bodies ; 
they are shaken by every stroke Hke an over- 
engined torpedo-boat. Now and then they do 
some trick-fishing out of sheer vanity, for no self- 
respecting gull could really like the mud-eating 
little whitebait that alone thrive in these waters. 
As a mere matter of curiosity, I tested the dirti- 
ness of the stream : a pencil dipped in it vanished 
completely from the point of contact. It reminded 
me more of a wheel-fouled puddle along the line 
of march in the South African war than anything 
else. At last the Hastings shoal is reached, and the 
far-spread, dull towers and chimneys of Rangoon lie 
out before us right and left. For here are the works 
of the Burma Oil Company planted, and the heavy 
smoke-wreaths from their clustered stacks are 
only too well reinforced by those of the cotton 
factories along the river banks. It is a sharp 
contrast, as, except for manufacturing purposes, 
no chimney is ever built upon the shores of the 
Irrawaddy. Except in the lines of the drifting 
smoke the air is as sharp and clear as anywhere 
in Asia, and the thin, bituminous veil which fades 
slowly down to leeward has its own curious value in 
this eastern landscape ; certainly it throws into 



RANGOON. 135 

higher reHef the clearly-defined splendour of the 
Shwe Dagon. 

The temple rises upon a roughly-cornered and 
well-wooded platform of rock one hundred and 
eighty feet above the sea. Once upon a time this 
splendid pedestal was a surf-beaten islet far 
out at sea ; if we may take as gospel the stories 
that cling about it, it must have been to an 
islani refuge that Gautama's predecessor came. 
For the claim to sanctity of the Shwe Dagdn does 
not rest upon its connection with Prince Gautama 
alone. Three thousand years before — some say 
twenty thousand and some do not scruple to add 
another similar period, and yet another incarnation 
to its long tradition — the predecessors of the Lord 
Buddha left here some mortal relics upon which 
the first pagoda was reared. Be that as it may, 
in its present shape it is a vast hand-bell of gold, 
three hundred feet in height, planted upon a cruci- 
form base of many degrees, forty feet above the 
surface of the rock. 

Just where the handle joins the bell there is a 
strongly-cut band of lotus ornament in low relief, 
and above it, near the top, just where the palm 
would lose its grip, is a belt of silver bosses that 
glitter like diamonds in the sun ; and at the very 



136 UNDER THE SUN. 

height is a " htee," composed in the usual way of a 
formal umbrella of golden rings from which, on 
interlacing chains, hundreds of leaf-clappered bells 
of jewelled gold and silver hang. Above it, set 
against the moving clouds, is a vane of pure gold. 
In this htee and vane are inset rubies which would 
fetch a hundred thousand pounds at Christie's. 
For many years all underneath this htee was gilded 
with gold-leaf, but as this involved a recurrent 
expense, of which the scaffolding demanded an 
even greater proportion than the gold, the trustees 
of the Shwe Dagon decided, in the interests of 
economy, to abandon the gold-leaf and — to plate 
the handle of the Shwe Dagon with sheets of solid 
gold ! So far the upper seventy feet has been 
completed, at a cost which is probably known to 
the trustees and to the Lieutenant-Governor alone. 
Each sheet is about the size of a folio page, and in 
thickness it is about half that of a threepenny 
piece. Conceive what this means. Conceive the 
sanctity which suggested and the wealth which 
rendered possible this gigantic expenditure upon a 
matter of decorum only. But there is only one 
Shwe Dagon, and what Lhasa is to the northern 
Buddhists among their wild and bare mountain 
passes, that Rangoon is to the far smaller, but also 




A corner in a monastery compound. 



{^Facing page 136. 



RANGOON. • 137 

far richer, community of the southern followers 
of the Master. 

About 1854, as the result of a persistent rumour 
that the centre of the Shw6 Dagon was hollowed 
out and was used as a treasure-house for the im- 
mense hoards of the Buddhist hierarchy, an English 
engineer drove a narrow shaft through the base of 
the pagoda. Nothing of value was found, not 
even an empty chamber, but as the shaft was 
pierced farther and farther into the interior, shell 
within shell of earlier Shwe Dagons was found, 
till when the centre was reached no fewer than 
seven layers had been disclosed by the pick. The 
present building, which is, so to speak, the latest, 
and probably the last coat of this architectural 
onion, was finished about 1564. It stands, as has 
been said, on a levelled hill-top ; there is a clear 
space all round it, such as is always needed for the 
processional lustrations of the Buddhist faith ; but 
closely pressing in upon this ambulatory is a forest 
of smaller shrines, jostling each other like the 
houses of a city. Some are of Burmese mirror- 
mosaic, some of solid stone or plaster, roughly 
resembling the Shwe Dagon itself ; some are like 
Indian chaityas, and a few are but rude shapes of 
sunburnt and plastered brick. But the vast 



138 UNDER THE SUN. 

majority are made of exquisitely and intricately 
carved teak. None of them attain a greater height 
than a hundred feet, except the four great tasounds 
which, at the four points of the compass, rise from 
the plinth of the Shwe Dagdn and give pretended 
access to the giant. 

Trees of all kinds flourish here ; cocoanuts lift 
their feathery heads among the gilded filigree of 
the smaller pagodas ; canary-trees, with their 
varicose trunks, afford refuge for scores of banked- 
up little shrines ; and in many places, of course, the 
sacred fig-tree grows and flourishes exceedingly. 
To gain access to this platform there were originally 
four great stairways. One was blocked up by 
ourselves in the middle of the last century for 
strategical purposes at the time of our first occupa- 
tion of Rangoon ; of the others, two are of minor 
importance, and that facing south is now the great 
avenue of approach. These famous stone steps, 
worn to ice-like slipperiness by the traversings of 
many million footfalls, make a fair entrance to the 
holy place. Two huge whitewashed leogryphs stand 
guardian on the level of the road outside. Behind 
them a new carved roofing of teak conducts the 
pious pilgrim under shelter to the iron gate of the 
stairs themselves. From this gate the steps ascend 



RANGOON. 139 

in semi-darkness. Overhead are barbaric painted 
beams and carved brackets as roof succeeds to roof. 
On both sides, between the rough and greasy- 
columns which support them, shops have been 
made and sometimes houses built in. 

The arcade thus formed is one of the most in- 
teresting thoroughfares of the East. There seems 
almost nothing that is not sold here. Toys of a 
hundred sorts are there, books of gold-leaf, gar- 
lands and strings of champak flowers and marigolds, 
sweets, and confectionery, European picture-books 
and native drawings sometimes of a most devotional 
and repulsive type, lengths of cotton dyed in every 
hue known to the spectroscope, gilt caps for children, 
shoes, umbrellas, fruit of every kind, candles of 
many kinds — it is a street in itself. But the colours 
of the wares are eclipsed by those worn by the 
moving crowds. The Burmese are a sun-loving 
race, and the poorest wears silk. Here is a man 
with a black-paper umbrella that is almost an 
inspiration of taste — the rest of him is clad in 
voluminous folds of old-gold silk. He is a phoung- 
yee, or Buddhist monk. Last year he may have 
been a thriving manufacturer on the Strand of 
Rangoon : next year he may be there again. Mean- 
while, his head shaven, he adopts the beggar's life 



I40 UNDER THE SUN. 

and joins at his appointed time in the muttered 
prayers that all day and all night ascend on incense 
fumes beneath the temple roofs of the Shwe Dagon. 
There is a young woman, with neatly-coiled black 
hair, a myrtle-green jacket, and a kind of bath- 
towel skirt of copper silk. Here is a white-clad 
Hindu, there a blue and white Mohammedan, both 
drawn hither on as idle a bent as yourself. A child 
runs up and offers a trifling gift, a cowrie or a 
flower; she does not want your quarter-annas, but 
takes them with a delightful prudery. A bridal pro- 
cession, with braying horns, blocks the way, and 
perhaps, in the foreigner's honour, the comedians of 
the show will give some burlesque impromptu as 
they pass. Chinese and Japanese frequent the 
platform. The former will make sure by a mut- 
tered prayer ; the latter ape the European in his 
patronising disinterestedness. A leper crawls along 
to your side and asks an alms. If you give it, you 
will have no more peace, for these maimed and 
footless wretches, though in aspect they are but a 
bunch of disfigured and knotted limbs, will sling 
themselves from all quarters along the ground beside 
you as fast as you can walk, and you will eventu- 
ally have to seek relief from their day-long perse- 
cution in flight. 




1^ 



RANGOON. 141 

There is much to see round the platform. Per- 
haps the story of the great bell is worth re- telling. 
When Rangoon was first captured by us, some 
worthy soul thought that it was fitting that the 
second largest bell in the world* — it weighs over forty 
tons — should find a home in London. With infinite 
pains and the use of the most recent machinery, 
it was brought down from the Shwe Dagon, put on 
board a special lighter, and — by an accident — 
dropped overboard in mid-stream. The ingenuity 
of the West was vainly taxed in trying to raise it 
from the river bed. Derricks, cranes, jacks, wind- 
lasses, donkey-engines, levers, diving suits — every- 
thing was used, and used in vain. It was im- 
possible, and at last it was decided that no more 
money and trouble should be wasted on the task. 
Some months later a little company of yellow-robed 
monks came down from the Shwe Dagon with a 
petition to the Governor. If they could raise the 
bell by their own efforts might they keep it ? The 
Governor laughed immoderately, and promptly 
wrote a special permission on those lines. It made 
the joke of a week in Rangoon. But not for more 
than the week. The little Burmans came to the 



* The broken and earthbound mass of metal at the Kremlin cannot -compete 
with these real bells of Burma. 



142 UNDER THE SUN. 

river bank and burnt incense and prayed a while. 
Then they set out on two great rafts and put their 
poor tackle of rope and bamboo-sticks together 
— and up came the bell, and there it is to this day 
under the two o'clock shadow of the great pagoda. 

But, interesting as the hours of sunlight are, 
night is the time to see the Shwe Dagon. There 
is then a charm about the huge plain, golden 
pinnacle, centring the darkened forest of teak and 
irresponsive glass mosaic, which defies analysis. 
Partly it may be the contrast, partly also the 
colour, partly the just waving crests of the cocoa- 
nuts, partly the faint, ever-present tinkle from the 
jewelled bells a hundred yards and more above 
our heads. Partly, perhaps, it is the quietude, 
that is helped, rather than hindered, by the blessed 
mutter of the Buddhist mass, where, round a gutter- 
ing yellow candle, a small knot of monks sit inton- 
ing, their faces and their golden robes thrown into 
Rembrandtesque relief. Every fantastic tale that 
ever was told chimes in now to your exceeding 
liking, and even the monstrous leogryphs at every 
corner ache again with the breaking heart of their 
prototype. The gold leaf on the bo-trees' trunks 
gleams fitfully, and one facet from the crown of a 
forgotten shrine flares out a point of ruby or 



RANGOON. 143 

emerald from the peopled darkness. The scent of 
thick incense reeks from a newly-filled censer, 
where a brighter glow than usual silhouettes the 
seated worshippers. 

Overhead the movement of the faint white gauze 
of cloud makes the darkened htee rock in heaven, 
and a far dog's bark sounds clear. There are half 
a dozen cheap orange and red lanterns round a 
swelling tree bole that has grown painfully round 
and enclosed a marble Buddha. The upper glint 
of whitened moon-lit gold vane cuts deep into side- 
long Orion ; even now it seems to belong rather to a 
mariner at sea thirty miles away, than to oneself 
— by day it is all his. And the last and most per- 
manent memory one carries away from Rangoon 
is that of this silent and austere sentinel, surrounded 
by a cluster of lesser and ornate shrines, cleaving 
his way upward to the dark purple sky, careless 
of their attendance, careless of the incense and the 
muttered prayers, but mystically absorbed in the 
far-distant sea, and perhaps also in those far-dis- 
tant hills on which the waves broke when the first 
of the legendary Buddhas halted for refuge on this 
lonely sea-encircled rock which is now the platform 
of the Shwe Dagon. 



144 



andal ay 



There are towns in this world whose very names 
are interesting. Wholly apart from their history, 
the mere syllables of their titles arrest attention, 
and one is more willing to hear idle matters con- 
cerning them than reports of interest about other 
less-favoured cities. It is easy, without taking 
thought, to suggest a round dozen of such places. 
One may see by the first name that it is no question 
of the intrinsic beauty or wealth or importance 
of the town, for Byzantium has an interest to which 
Constantinople can lay no claim. Others are 
Ravenna, Santa Cruz and Throndhjem, Cairo, 
Monterey and Samarkand, Baghdad, La Guayra 
and Bamborough, Aleppo perhaps, certainly Cadiz, 
Lhasa, and Carcassonne. Of this company is Man- 
dalay. Long before it was wedded to a popular 
song the sound of Mandalay's name promised great 
things of Oriental mystery, barbarism, and colour. 
Fifty years ago stray messengers from the Court of 




Chill 



[See page 26. 




"-» filiirWiirM aaBMMMl 



Mandalay. 



\Faciiig page 144. 



MANDALAY. 145 

Burma had already been despatched so far as to 
London, and their accounts of King Mindon's 
magnificence were supported by the tales of the 
rare travellers who had ventured so far inland. 

There is, by the way, a tale of one of these envoys 
who returned to Burma from a visit to London. 
The King asked him whether the Europeans had 
any such fine architecture as Mandalay could 
boast. The envoy, to whom the Houses of Parlia- 
ment had seemed too splendid to be real, and the 
Crystal Palace like the unsubstantial fabric of a 
dream, was sorely perplexed how to give such a truth- 
ful answer as would not offend his master. After a 
moment's hesitation, he replied, " Your Universal 
Majesty must remember that these barbarians 
who inhabit the uttermost parts of your Majesty's 
planet live in so painful and chilly a climate that I 
did not see even one teak tree in their land such 
as Burma produces in millions for the great buildings 
of Mandalay." 

The style and title of the Kings of Burma ran 

in a manner which even the Shah of Persia would 

deem vainglorious, and it is all a part and parcel 

of this arrogance of place that the central spire 

of the palace, that which canopies the Lion Throne 

itself, is to this day popularly called the "Centre 

10 



146 UNDER THE SUN. 

of the Universe " in Mandalay.* The argument 
is easy to follow. That which is the centre of 
the palace, and therefore of Mandalay — for the 
present bazaars near the railway station are of 
English construction — must needs be the centre 
also of Burma, of the earth, and therefore of the 
celestial satellites also, which plainly revolve all 
night round the seat of the King of the Burmese. 

The throne itself is a handsome gilt projection 
from the inner palace wall into the throne room. It 
is raised several feet from the floor, and can be 
entered only from the back — a little extra touch of 
dramatic effect, that one is confident would have 
been adopted by Napoleon had he ever heard of it. 
Its name is derived from some score of small 
golden lions, which originally occupied the courses 
of the empty niches of the pedestal. The capture 
of the city and palace by the English troops is re- 
sponsible for their absence, and, as not one of them 
has ever been since recovered, the probability is that 
the figures were — as the Burmese asserted — actually 
made of solid gold, which the looters preferred, for 
obvious reasons, to melt down as soon as possible. 

The palace of Mandalay lies centrally within 
the four-square walls of the fort. To the east 

* At the present moment it is being entirely rebuilt. 



MANDALAY. 147 

was the King's residence ; to the west that of 
the Queen and the harem generally. Until the 
last year or two the apartments in which these 
favourites lived were used as the guest house, 
and I well remember staying in one of them some 
years ago. It was a detached house, to the only 
floor of which one climbed by a wide ladder, and 
inside it was decorated throughout with the mirror- 
mosaic which to this day is the most characteristic 
ornament of Burmese art. The dining-room of 
the English club had been a reception-hall, and 
the exquisite screens in gold and looking-glass 
quarrels of white and green are still there in 
perfect preservation. The writing-room of the club 
was the Lily Throne Room — the lilies also are 
gone — and up through the central passage, between 
the writing-tables and newspaper racks, and one 
revolving case of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," 
the little silk-clad Burmese used to come to press 
their foreheads down on the base of the throne 
while their thin jackets rippled under the breeze 
of the club punkahs overhead. 

Outside, to the south, are the King's gardens. 
To the north are the Queen's, and these are worth 
a visit. In the middle is a large rectangular pool, 

fringed with high palms and reflecting the blaze 

10* 



148 UNDER THE SUN. 

of many-coloured flowers. It is a quiet spot, 
and only one object there suggests anything but 
tranquil and idyllic peace. This is a slightly- 
raised dyke, fifty yards long, which runs away from 
the north-east corner of the pool. It looks like 
a filled-in trench, and so it is. But King Thebaw 
lost his kingdom when, in 1879, he filled it in, for 
under this rough heaping of bricks and rubble and 
earth he had, at the suggestion of the Alenandaw 
Queen, Supiyalat's mother, buried alive every other 
soul of the Royal dynasty who could have made 
trouble during his reign. It is a hideous story, 
and was not made the pleasanter by the assurance 
that some of the wretches lived — visibly lived, by 
the movements of the dyke — for two whole days. 
We immediately withdrew our representative at 
Mandalay, which for Thebaw was the beginning 
of the end. Already we were in possession of 
Southern Burma, and an opportunity only was 
needed to put an end to the continual and danger- 
ous pourparlers which were constantly exchanged 
between Thebaw and the French. We could not 
allow Upper Burma to fall into the hands of any 
other European Power, and we were, as the owners 
of Lower Burma, more or less responsible for 
Thebaw's fidelity to his obligations to our own 



MANDALAY. I40 

Subjects. Our action produced iio good result, 
so six and a half years later we marched into 
Mandalay almost without a shot, and Thebaw is 
to-day enjoying a change which, though of less 
responsibility, can hardly be called one of greater 
freedom on the coast of the Bombay Presidency. 
Such is the significance of these shaded gardens; 
and as one leaves them to cross the wide, open 
spaces of bumt-up grass which have taken the 
place of the old, dangerous, and unhealthy native 
city, one is little disposed to quarrel with an an- 
nexation which has placed under our government 
a little people which has ever since congratulated 
itself upon this transference of its allegiance. 

Outside the fort there is much to see. The 
exquisite delicacy of the Queen's Golden Monastery, 
the squat magnificence of Chow-tor-yar-jee-paya 
— this, by the way, is the way it is pronounced, 
not the way it is spelled ; the thousand pagodas — 
there are only five hundred and twenty-five as a 
matter of accuracy ; the Mingun mass of split 
brickwork — the biggest in the world after the 
Abhayagiriya pile in Ceylon — and the adj acent bell, 
which is the largest bell and gives the deepest 
note of any in the world — there is much to see, if 
you are anxious to see it all. 



ISO UNDER THE SUN. 

The Queen's Golden Monastery — I say it with 
reluctance, because superlatives are too often used 
by travellers — is, so far as I know, the most 
picturesque place in the East, probably in the 
world. There is one particular square yard of 
ground in its courtyard from which there can be 
obtained at the four cardinal points four distinct 
pictures, each in its own way unique. One is 
that of the annexed plate. The effect of the well- 
head, a weathered spire of carved brown wood, 
in the middle of the rich green of the palm trees, is 
very fine, and the more distant monastery spire of 
tarnished gold, worn red lacquer, and sepia-shaded 
timber, composes itself into one indescribable tint 
in bold relief against the blue. Nor is the Arakan 
pagoda less worth the half-hour's drive back along 
the railway line. Next to the Shwe Dagon this 
is the most sacred temple in Burma. For good 
reason too : it contains the image of which the 
Master in person welded together the fragments into 
one seamless monolith, when Visvakarma himself 
failed to unite them. It is a large brazen idol, 
bigger, but, like the golden idol in Lhasa by the 
same sculptor, claiming to date from the lifetime 
of Prince Gautama. Here he sits in his recess, 
somewhat unkindly in feature and ungainly in 




THE QUEEK'S GOLDEN MONASTERY, MANDALAY 



MANDALAY. 151 

bulk, but undeniably impressive. Before him burn 
the guttering candles of worship in hundreds, 
and a massive iron screen is drawn across the 
opening every night at six o'clock, waking the 
echoes of the colonnaded temple with the hoarse 
travelling of its rusty guides. But still the 
squatting worshippers sit on in the aisle until 
the candles burn low upon the rail and dark- 
ness again hides from their sight the unrelenting 
features. All round the central shrine is the hub- 
bub and crowding of an ordinary Burmese bazaar. 
Every alley is filled with chafferers, and you may 
secure better mechanical wooden toys for eight- 
pence here than half-a-crown would buy you in 
London. Beyond, at the back, is the holy tank, 
from which the best view is to be had of the 
gilded terraces and pinnacles of the dazzling central 
spire. The Arakan pagoda owes its prosperous 
state to-day solely to the fact that to repair it 
is a virtuous act and one that releases from the 
consequences of sin. It is one of the three great 
temples of Rangoon, Arakan, and Pegu respectively 
to which this unusual privilege attaches. The 
Burmese judge it but a waste of money and good 
intentions to put any other shrine in order, and 
therefore the land is dotted with the ruined 



152 UNDER THE SUN. 

simulacra of the pious erections of other generations, 
crumbhng and lopsided, while beside them, spick 
and span with whitewash and somewhat garish 
in the sun, rise the offerings and memorials of the 
present day. 

Yet, whatever attractions there may be waiting 
for you outside Mandalay you will go back to the 
fort and sit contentedly beside the palace walls 
watching the sharp, clear pinnacle of the Centre of 
the Universe against the amethyst of the northern 
sky, and listening to the silence, which the dis- 
tant sound of a trotting ox-wagon, a mere speck 
on the road, seems only to make more oppressive. 
Not a leaf of the breadfruit palms or of the clamber- 
ing mallows at their feet is stirred. It seems 
impossible that this scene of utter quiet can have 
been the scene of such foul barbarities and blood- 
thirsty superstitions. A grey squirrel jerks out 
from under a forgotten cactus clump and flounces 
back, more out of habit than real fright, the domino 
wings of a hoopoe flutter, a streak of luminous blue 
betrays a kingfisher who, for five minutes, had been 
motionless on a stump, watching with eagerness the 
tiny circles in the water below. Yet the fact 
remains that the foundations of the great central 
gates in the middle of the more than mile-long 



MANDALAY. 153 

fort walls are laid upon human skeletons. The foul 
atrocities of Thebaw are still faintly echoed in the 
fireside stories of the old men. Perhaps it was 
only another of those cases wherein, to misquote 
in all reverence a well-known proverb, our 
opportunity came with the utter extremity of 
another race. To-day the Burmese are happy ; 
happier, perhaps, as a whole, than any other race 
in the world, and it would do many a pessimist 
good to see Monsieur, Madame et Bebe — the latter 
a collective term out here — start for their sunset 
jaunt in search of fresh air and gossip along the 
wide streets of Mandalay. After all, it is difficult 
to be sad when one is wearing white silk and a 
tight pink turban, and one's wife and children 
are dazzling in lemon yellow, Venetian red, and 
olive green. Besides, there is always the family 
ring with the big, bad cabochon ruby from Mogok, 
which will tide over a month or two of hard times 
in a country which, as King Bodawpaya once neatly 
said, was so much the favourite of heaven that 
the very waters of the river added to it many square 
miles of new territory every year. 



154 



Madras. 



The rest of India professes to be vastly diverted 
with Madras. There is no civihan so newly landed 
that he cannot poke his uncertain piece of fun at 
the " benighted presidency/' no subaltern who does 
not smile at the mention of Madrassi troops. All 
this is wholesome enough. The plain truth is that 
Madras has reached a pitch of security, prosperity, 
and efficient administration that leaves little still 
to be done — little, that is, while the rest of this 
teeming peninsula demands attention so much more 
urgently in elementary departments of govern- 
ment. Education has been carried as far in Madras 
as it safely can be carried, and the bewildered 
English tourist's heart goes out to the street boys 
in her capital who speak and delight in speaking 
English. Irrigation in other parts learned its first 
steps from Madras, and though the splendid 
systems of the Punjab are now far more gigantic 
and support a hundred to Madras's ten, it yet 



MADRAS. 155 

remained for the southern engineers to conceive 
and carry out the principle of the Periyar dam. 
From one end of the presidency to the other order 
is perfectly kept — Madras's sneerers say easily kept 
indeed, but is that of necessity a reproach ? — save 
when some Moplah community sets out on its 
undistinguished war-path, or a religious quarrel has 
embittered the relations of two Saivite communities. 
Taxation is better distributed here, and more cheer- 
fully rendered, than elsewhere, and the actual re- 
turns are proof enough that in material prosperity 
Madras, the milch cow of India, is easily first among 
the provinces of the peninsula. Yet Anglo-India 
still diverts itself at the expense of the southern 
presidency. 

It is worth while to consider this for a moment. 
The tendency is, as has been said, healthy enough 
in reality. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
or what is the light-blue riband of the Star of India 
or a seat on the Council for ? Madras has long 
passed through that age of striving and heart- 
sickening anxiety in which from time to time the 
rest of our Asiatic Empire seems to labour still. 
And it is for that reason, and for that alone, that 
she has ceased to be interesting. There is much 
to administer, there is little left to achieve. No 



15^ UNDER THE SUM. 

turbulent frontier province here challenges the 
pluck, or character, or tact of men ; no internecine 
quarrel between Mussulman and Hindu threatens 
the peace of a commissionership ; no famine or 
plague drains the life-blood of ten thousand square 
miles. Her stormy youth is passed, the new battle- 
grounds are a thousand miles from her and, far 
removed from frontier strife, Madras rests and 
works in peace. But she has had her jeunesse 
orageuse, her battlegrounds gave birth to an Empire, 
and we should never forget that there was one 
terrible moment when the frontiers of British India 
were but a gunshot from the walls of Cuddalore. If 
it were not encouraging to realise that upon initia- 
tive and advance the ambitions of young Anglo-India 
are still set as firmly as ever, there would be some- 
thing sad in the fact that Clive's province is now 
regarded as an uninteresting backwater ; if it were 
not true that all things are with more pleasure 
chased than enjoyed, there would be something ridi- 
culous in the lesser estimation in which is held the 
one and only district in India that, after many years, 
approximates to-day to that ideal of peace and 
prosperity which our rule professes as its aim, and 
in very truth strains every nerve to secure. 

Life in Madras runs on placidly, far from the 



MADRAS. 157 

uncertainty that lies at the core of all the enjoyment 
of Englishmen. The rest of the peninsula takes 
uncrediting example from her in almost every 
department of administration, and the ryot of the 
distant Ganges valley owes more contentment to the 
ripe experience of Madras than he will ever know or 
his local benefactor ever confess. But Madras is 
indifferent. With all the happiness of an un- 
historied State, she goes her way rejoicing, but 
unsung, and almost wholly unvisited. The igno- 
rance of Upper India in this matter is surprising 
— in the Punjab or the United Provinces hardly 
one official in two hundred has ever journeyed 
to Madras, and all the average Army officer knows 
of the south is confined to a year or two's unwilling 
acquaintance with Bangalore. Yet Madras teems 
with interest. Apart from her history — and it is 
all of a piece with this ignorance that Clive re- 
mains unhonoured to-day in India by even an 
obelisk — the racial and architectural peculiarities 
of the south are far more characteristic of the 
inhabitants than elsewhere. One of the most im- 
portant reasons of this retention of individuality 
is that here the Mohammedan flood was stayed. 
Except on the sea coast, where the Gulf traders 
put into the quiet ports, there is Httle of Islam 



158 UNDER THE SUN. 

here, and caste reigns with a supremacy which is 
found nowhere else in India. 

There is hardly a village community in the south, 
from the Puliahs and the Todas — outcasts from even 
the lowest and most despised of sweeper gatherings 
— to the lordly Nambutiri Brahmin, who walks 
along groaning aloud continually that all lesser men 
may clear away from his path, which is not full of 
quaint interest. Merias, thieves and descendants 
of men saved by us from being butchered on the 
" elephant " by the snake-eating Khonds ; Arudras 
and Irulas, whose women are sufficiently married 
if a man allows one of them a whiff from the cheroot 
in his mouth, or a mouthful from his dinner, perhaps 
of roast monkey or boiled rat ; Brahmins, who 
marry plantain trees ; men of Tanjore, who secure 
good harvests by swinging men from trees by a 
hook fixed in the muscles of the back — there is 
not a superstition or a caste prejudice of India 
which does not still flourish in Madras, despite 
the spread of education and the easy and full rail- 
way inter-communications which within the last 
few years have been almost completed in many 
districts. Perhaps human sacrifice may still be 
carried on in some remote mountain tract, for all 
the protestation of the neighbouring tribes ; cer- 



MADRAS. 159 

tainly, some of the customs of the Malabar coast 
are as unnatural, if not as barbarous. The point 
of view is all. 

Some years ago Lord Ampthill, the late Governor 
— to whom no small part of the continued and 
confirmed prosperity of the presidency of late 
years must^ in common fairness, be ascribed — 
tried to explain the objections which the Indian 
Government entertained to the " hook-swinging " 
practice to which reference has been made. Finding 
that other considerations were urged in vain, his 
Excellency employed the argumentum ad homineniy 
" How would you hke to be * hook-swung ' your- 
self ? " The reply was instant but disconcerting, 
"If it were thought necessary, I should have no 
objection." The man who spoke was a man of 
position and reputation. In this flourishing great 
Eden there is still ample evidence of the vast gulf 
that divides not only the East from the West, 
but one part of the East from another. Still, in 
Madras there is the India that eighteenth-century 
travellers described — unchanged, unchangeable per- 
haps, certainly all the healthier for being allowed 
free and fair play, whatever the crooked bent of 
custom, myth, and tradition. Men have walked 
over red-hot iron bars within a drive of Govern- 



i6o UNDER THE SUN. 

ment House; to secure their husbands' escape the 
women of the thieving Koragas still tear themselves 
till they faint for loss of blood ; the men of the 
Kuravas still practise the '' couvade." Yet the 
orderliness of the land is no whit the worse for 
these follies, and the inhabitants are much the 
happier. Indeed, it would be difficult to point to 
any part of all our wide dominions where our rule 
has proved more beneficial, and one is at a loss 
whether to admire or to smile at the imitative 
dexterity of Roman missionaries on the south- 
west coast, who still permit their converts to ob- 
serve with all strictness the prejudices of their 
caste ! 

For the ethnologist and the student of human 
nature alike there is no field like that of the tribes 
of Southern India, and it is the last and best testi- 
mony to our wisdom that their peculiarities may 
be observed side by side with the prosperity and 
content which are too often regarded as achievable 
only at the cost of a partial Europeanisation of 
those committed to our care. Dull Madras may 
be, but there is no such prosperity in any State 
as in that which has at last curtailed the chances 
of personal distinction, except along the unexciting 
lines of a more and more perfect administration, and 




-MAHABALIPURAM. 



MADRAS. i6i 

to this happiness the presidency can at least lay 
claim. 

Madras itself lies flatling along the eastern 
straight-edge of sand and gravel which defies 
the Indian Ocean. To make a harbour — the 
mention of Madras harbour will bring either a 
smile or a sneer to the lips of most marine engi- 
neers — great breakwaters have been thrown out at 
enormous cost into the sea. In fine weather it is 
safe for ships to anchor within them and disem- 
bark their cargoes and their crews, but an easterly 
storm-cone will send them packing out through the 
narrow entrance to an offing miles out at sea. More- 
over, the southern breakwater serves as a groyne 
for the arrest of the northward-travelling coast, 
and the work of years may be ruined when the 
ramp of sand extends out to the end of the southern 
wall and begins to pour its deposits across the 
mouth of the harbour. Already it is half-way out. 

Inland Madras is a fair city of green and pleasant 
distances. The old flavour of the Honourable 
Company reigns here to this day. A man will have 
his acres of garden or coarse lawn around his house, 
and the damp steamy swamps south of the city 
towards the Adyar are as Job Charnock left them 

— perhaps as they were when Saint Thomas laid 

II 



i62 UNDER THE SUN. 

down his life many centuries ago just where the 
stucco cathedral lifts a white spire among the palm- 
groves of the foreshore. Whether the legend be true 
or not, may be left to divines and antiquarians to 
decide, but its persistence here — unquestioned till 
the middle of the eighteenth century — adds a 
pleasant finish to the rare records of connection 
between East and West. 

From Madras the most interesting excursion 
to be made lies thirty-five miles due south. It 
may be made in many ways, but the most com- 
fortable of all is to drop down the Buckingham 
Canal all night in a house-boat, and find the " Seven 
Pagodas " half a mile away across the sandspit in 
the morning. There is nothing so tantalising in 
India as these remains on the narrow low peninsula 
of Mahabalipuram. Of their history little is cer- 
tainly known. Every period of Indian art and 
religion except — and even this is not certain — the 
Asokan influence seems to have combined to add 
its relic to the curious medley, and the fact that in 
great measure the temples are monolithic has 
effectually prevented the work of one generation 
from being pulled down or adapted by another. Five 
" raths " and a stone elephant are the first objects 
that meet the eye. Among them is a singularly 



MADRAS. 163 

fine model — it is scarcely more — of a Buddhist 
vimana or storeyed monastery. The others are 
relics of Hindu worship, which have been, consciously 
or unconsciously, influenced by their Buddhist 
neighbour. 

But it is not from these monoliths that the 
" Seven Pagodas " takes its name. Across the ridge 
of the little peninsula, all sand and casuarina, you 
may pick your way to where the sea breaks idly 
in the sun against the coast. Almost in the sea 
itself there still remain two of the Seven Pagodas ; 
the others, like the drowned churches off Suffolk, 
are five fathoms deep half a mile out at sea. Of the 
two that remain, that dedicated to Siva is of great 
beauty and even greater archaeological importance. 
Fergusson, whose knowledge of Indian architecture 
has supplied even his opponents with most of what 
is known on the subject, ranks this small sea- 
beaten vimana as only second in importance to 
Tanj ore's huge temple. It is something to re- 
member, one's first acquaintance with this 
romantically placed shrine. The sketch which is 
here reproduced — a certain green of almost phos- 
phorescent intensity between emerald and olivine 
which the sunlit sea here wears is beyond the 
possibilities of colour reproduction— was made from 

II* 



i64 UNDER THE SUN. 

the dark inner chamber of the temple. In this 
room nothing at first can be distinguished, so 
dazzled is the retina still with the white hot glare of 
the sand outside. But at last the low-relief figures 
on the opposite wall can be distinguished, and the 
huge black stump of a lingam in the centre of the 
small room. The contrast between these age- 
and smoke-darkened walls and the dancing white 
and green of the unrolling surf seen below through 
the open doorway is one of the eerie things of 
India. It so far resembles sitting in a darkened 
opera-house and watching a scene from the 
" Ring," that for the first time one realises the 
one thing impossible on the stage — the on-sweep 
and mount and spray-silvered fall and spread of 
homing sea-waves. Their sound echoes like an 
insistent ground-tenor all round the chamber, and 
the fall of a greater or less wave is unnoticed here 
among the droning harmonies. Inshore, the sea 
is so soon sanded that it becomes olivine ; beyond, 
its vivid green glitter serves to emphasize the dark 
horizon belt of cerulean from which it is separated 
by the white horses that break a mile away over 
the pinnacles and spires of the lost shrines. Thirty 
yards away, in the very thickest of the foam, is a 
green weeded rock, on which the flag pillar^ so com- 



MADRAS. 165 

mon in the temples of southern India, still stands. 
It is now but eighteen feet in height, and in its 
broken solitude it adds exactly the right note of 
desolation to the scene. 

I cannot understand why the *' Seven Pagodas " 
has not long been exploited by some tourist 
agency. There is nothing else like it in the world, 
and, alas ! it is only too easily reached from Madras. 
But before that evil day of notoriety comes, go 
and see it now — now, while still it remains as un- 
tainted by Western influence as the falls of the 
Brahmaputra. 

" Arj Una's Penance," a series of figures of animals 
and men and gods cut upon a flattened rock, is of 
considerable extent and of some interest, and other 
temples and sculptures await you all over the 
little peninsula, but in picturesque beauty none 
can compare with either the Raths or the Seven 
Pagodas. Spend your day among them, and you 
will be towed back in the lingering sunset well 
contented with these new things in the scrap-book 
of your experience. If you sketch, so much the better, 
however badly you may do it, for the temples are 
worth detailed study, and you can store your 
memory twice as well when a pencil-stroke crystal- 
lizes and shapes an impression. But it will be waste 



i66 UNDER THE SUN. 

of time to finish your sketches on the house-boat 
roof. It is better to lie back and watch the orange 
and opal die out in the west, and mark the on- 
coming of the vedettes and scouts of the wary- 
battalions of heaven. Soon you will be aware of 
something unusual in these cold argent constellations 
steadily powdering the purple spaces of the sky : a 
moment later you will discover that in these tropics 
the stars in the zenith do not twinkle. There is a 
good reason for this, but at first it comes as a 
novelty which every traveller finds out for himself 
to his own vast self-congratulation and pleasure. 




SIVA'S TEMPLE AT THE SEVEN PAGODAS. 



1 6; 



Cochin and Kottyam. 



The leafless white branches of the champaks throw 
a tangled shadow like black lace upon the moon- 
whitened turf of the Residency lawn ; overhead 
there is a sound of a going in the tops of the casua- 
rinas ; and all round, through the warm movement 
of the sultry night breeze, sweeps in the lap and 
trickle of the lagoon against the tufa blocks at the 
water's edge. Across the lagoon the rare lights of 
Cochin speckle the low, misty line of dense cocoa- 
nuts, and the antiphon of some invisible rowers back 
from Ernakulam in the very moon's pathway is 
timed by the ground bass of their thudding thole- 
pins. If ever there were a land of peace it is here 
in Cochin, where Vasco da Gama's keels first 
floundered in the soft sand of the bar, and the soil 
of India was broken by the earliest of those Renais- 
sance 'venturers who were to change the face of the 
land. Vasco's house is to be seen still, shouldered 
up, in the narrow street not far from the church. 



i68 UNDER THE SUN. 

No doubt it is the right one. Why should a lotus- 
eater lie to tickle the stranger's fancy ? 

Older things by far are still flourishing here — 
oldest of all that strangest of communities, the 
White Jews of Cochin. Of their origin nothing is 
known certainly. Their records run for seven 
hundred years, so there must have been some even 
in this uttermost part of the earth to shudder 
with terror when the white and gold flags of Ca- 
tholicism flapped lazily in the land-wind beyond the 
line of surf. These Jews have bred in and in till 
all that is left is pure Semite. The splendid fore- 
heads and straight hawk-eyes about the aquiline 
nose, the nostrils, just a trifle over-curved upon 
the cheek, the full beards, which hide the fuller 
lips, keep a more majestic type than other Jews. 
The skin is dead white, untannable, and the first 
view of this the farthest lost of the tribes is as 
uncanny as the first sight a stranger catches of an 
ash-whitened bhairagi, or, weirder still, of the 
albino " kakrelaks," horrible parodies of the white 
man, with their dull, hairless, pink skins and 
blinking red-tinged eyes. All is in order in the 
parathesi here — the scrolls of the law within the 
panels of the reredos, the brass railings of the 
reading dais clean and polished — and one suddenly 



COCHIN AND KOTTYAM. 169 

realises that everywhere underfoot are the finest 
old blue Dutch tiles that ever made a collector 
break the last of this community's own command- 
ments. 

Half a mile away along the street is the syna- 
gogue of the Black Jews, a poorer house, but as 
scrupulously furnished in due ritual. These Jews 
represent the left-handed offspring of mixed unions, 
which the children of purely Jewish marriages 
ostracised from the chief tabernacle. In the course 
of centuries the Semitic traits of this body have 
become greatly weakened. The type is here 
scarcely recognisable, and the congregation of the 
Kadvoobagam might be of the normal Cochinese 
natives were it not for a certain clearness in the 
white of the eye, a touch of brown in the hair, and 
a much lower nasal index, to use the language of 
ethnologists. Elephantiasis is extremely common 
among them as well as their white brethren. 

Out by the edge of the lagoon, past the Maha- 
raja's old palace, picturesquely placed beside the 
White Jews' clock tower, and exquisitely frescoed 
in tones of ochre and Indian red, with subjects 
that occidentals prefer to leave unrepresented, the 
street of Cochin runs on between long bazaars, 
where the steady clang of the brazier's hammer. 



I/O UNDER THE SUN. 

or the strong, sweet scent of ginger or turmeric 
betrays the trade of the quarter. All is dirty and 
careless as ever in India. Goats, with the nap worn 
off their knees and bloodhound ears, attitudinise 
upon the house steps, and the grey crows hop and 
jostle each other for their street quarries. A bridge 
over an inlet carries us down to the open grass of 
the point where the spidery cantilevers of the 
fishing machines dive and rise again in orderly 
gravity from before dawn till long past sunset. 

The strangest features of this land are its water- 
ways. Hidden from the unrest of the Indian Ocean 
by a long, linked barrier of island and reef and bar, 
the lazy chain of canals and lakes stretches itself 
for two hundred miles, and a man can go upon a 
surface like a mill-pool from Cochin to Trivandrum 
and farther still. Now salt, now brackish, and now 
fresh, the waterways thread their path parallel 
between the mountains and the sea, sometimes a 
shade beneath avenues of palms, sometimes spread- 
ing out into wide, shallow lakes, through which 
even the eighteen-inch draught of the row-barges 
has to be guided by forlorn stakes, jutting nakedly 
above the scarcely ruffled water, each a perch for 
cormorants. All day and all night the fourteen 
rowers in the body of the boat paddle on, washing 




A woman of Travancore. 



[^Facing page 170, 



COCHIN AND KOTTYAM. 171 

out mightily with their mustard-spoon -hke oars, 
and singing roughly but not unmusically as the 
banks slip by. Generally the helmsman starts the 
song. Two lines of harsh, angular Malay alam is 
answered by a roar from the chorus on the thwarts, 
a second recitative receives its proper response, a 
third, a fourth, and at last a fiftieth, is equally 
robustly capped. The phrase " Mi-ne-yarra-(2/i-si " 
is extremely common as a rower's cry, the boat 
plunging forward a good fathom on the " ah." 
Then there is a minute's silence, broken perhaps 
by a long-drawn " Wah ! " This is not a con- 
tribution to the boat's melody, it is a warning that 
too fast a stroke is being set, and it is instantly 
responded to, the rowers coming forward with 
almost exaggerated slowness for the next half-dozen 
strokes and pulling them through with a vicious swish. 
It is a land in which it seems always to be 
afternoon. No one is poor, no one is energetic. 
Here in the uttermost recesses of India old habits 
linger that have long been abandoned elsewhere. 
Women think it a slur upon their good name to wear 
anything above the waist, and worthy missionaries 
find themselves placed in a difficulty by an imme- 
morial custom that associates the wearing of any 
upper garment with loose morals. Cochin and 



172 UNDER THE SUN. 

Travancore live upon their fish and their cocoa- 
nuts. All day long and all year long the women 
beat out into a golden tangle the inner fibres of the 
green husk, while the men pilot huge barge-loads 
of the fruit along the narrow canals. If there is the 
faintest wind the mat-work sail is hoisted, and lying 
idly in the afternoon half-asleep one often starts to 
find a bold tattered squaresail hanging grandly 
overhead filtering the splendours of the sunset. 

Kottyam lies some miles up a reach, away even 
from the main back-water. Perhaps there are few 
places of any interest in India so utterly unvisited. 
The interest of Kottyam lies in the curious settle- 
ment of Christians, who still maintain here their 
ancient ritual. Early in the sixth century a tra- 
veller reported in Rome that there were Christians 
in Ma-le, " where the pepper comes from," under 
a bishop who was consecrated in Persia. This is 
true enough to-day, except that Antioch has super- 
seded Nineveh as the metropolis of these remote 
exiles. Who founded the colony ? Saint Thomas, 
says the unanimous voice of Indian tradition. In 
the church at Kottyam you may see the picture of 
the Doubting Apostle, with his finger-tip stained 
yet with the blood that the spear of Longinus drew. 
But history still hesitates. Three Thomases may 




The Synagogue of the White Jews, Cochin. 




The Church, Kottyam. 



IFaciiig/'ao-e 172. 



COCHIN AND KOTTYAM. 173 

indeed claim the credit of being the protevangelist 
of India, and he who seems most hkely to have 
handed down the famiUar name in Malabar was a 
lusty bigamist and merchant first, and a pillar of 
Christianity afterwards. 

The truth is that the expulsion of the followers 
of Nestorius by their false friend, Theodosius, in 
431, created this among the other refuges in farther 
Asia for the persecuted sect. But the remoteness 
of Kottyam from civilisation and its immunity 
from the exterminating invasions of Timur have 
contributed to the preservation in this out-of-the- 
way spot of a last survivor of primitive Christian 
communities. Safe from external influences,* the 
tradition has been handed down under circum- 
stances that would have been impossible else- 
where. It is curious to notice that the history of 
this tiny offshoot of Christianity has been a faith- 
ful reflex in miniature of mightier schools. If, after 
the first exile, there has been the same persecution 
from without, there has at least been the same 
intestinal warfare within the fold. Even now there 
are two, if not three, distinct bodies among these 
" Syrian " Christians, and the successive reformers 

* Tke Anglo-Saxon Chrojiicle records that in 883 King Alfred sent Sighelm 
Bishop of Sherborne to the church founded by St. Thomas in India. He brought 
back gems and spices of great value. 



174 UNDER THE SUN. 

on their miniature stage play as valiant a part as 
other and greater of their kidney. Besides these 
protagonists of Kottyam, there is a Syrian church 
here which is in full communion with Rome, but 
is permitted to retain many of its peculiar forms 
of discipline and ritual, and a company of schis- 
matics formed in 1868 ; all, of course, claim to 
represent the true spirit that breathed in the 
Jacobite church. Between them, so far as antiquity 
of ritual is concerned, there is no question. The 
old sect of Kottyam is, out of all cavilling, that 
Christian community which represents the early 
ceremonial of the faith in its least amended form. 
No one can attend its services without realising 
this, and the fact that the officiating priests are of 
a dark race only serves to emphasise the fact that 
Christianity is essentially a Semitic and not a Cau- 
casian religion. 

A Mass in the old church here reminds one vaguely 
of the ritual in St. Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris, though 
the Maronite service has probably little real con- 
nection with this : bearded and married priests, 
the drawing and undrawing of the chancel curtain^ 
and similar lesser points may be all there really is 
in common. 

The curtain that hangs across the sanctuary arch 



COCHIN AND KOTTYAM. 175 

is pulled aside, and the native priest, in a full 
flowered cope of crimson and green silk almost 
concealing a plain alb and a conventionalised stole 
of dark red silk, confined by a sash at the waist, 
moves up to the altar, attended by two acolytes. 
After walking round the altar, to the discordant 
noise of every bell in the church and the rattling 
sistra in the hands of the acolytes, the service begins. 
Not only is it conducted in the Malayalam dialect 
— the invocation and consecration alone being in 
Syriac — but the Mass itself is dissimilar from any- 
thing in Europe both in the order and the manner 
of its progress. The kiss of peace is circulated 
early in the service, almost immediately after the 
reading of the two Epistles. A long sermon in the 
vernacular then gave one an opportunity of 
noticing the tenth-century cross let into the eastern 
end of the north side chapel, and the frankly Saivite 
ornamentation of the church itself. Yalis, mon- 
keys, and lotus circles seem curious in a Christian 
church, and even St. Thomas's emblem, the pea- 
cock, seems more reminiscent of Kartikkeya or 
Sarasvati than of the sceptical disciple of Galilee, 
Against the western wall of the church there is a 
delightful scene. A European sportsman with gun 
and dog is having a good day with \yild duck. 



176 UNDER THE SUN. 

The mixing of the chaHce takes place while the 
chancel arch curtain is again drawn forward, and 
the curious lustration of the altar is then per- 
formed once more, to the same discord of bells and 
sistra as before. One of the peculiar features of 
the service is that there is a solemn invocation of 
the Holy Spirit, by whom, and not by the priest, 
the sacred elements are directly consecrated. This 
in itself is enough to indicate the extraordinary 
age of the ceremonial type. The Christian priest- 
hood of every branch of the faith was quick to see 
the great personal honour and political advantage 
to be gained by endowing the ministrant himself 
with this privilege, and the present claims of Rome 
are not indirectly based upon the right of the 
Catholic priests to act alone in this matter as the 
direct vicegerents of God, The elements are 
received in both kinds, the wafer being dipped in 
the chalice, and the Mass terminates with the filing 
past of the whole congregation, every adult and 
child receiving a touch from the priest's maniple. 
The use of the cope instead of the chasuble during 
the communion is curious as an example of a use 
which is now and has been from time immemorial 
observed at St. Paul's in London. This ancient 
custom has of course been abandoned, for the 




flisart*** 



Entrance to the Church, Kottyam. 



[J^acu!^ page 1 76. 



COCHIN AND KOTTYAM. 177 

Italian use in modern Roman Catholic churches. A 
link with the past which the Romanists claim as 
their own is thus severed, and it rather adds to 
the regret that there are few or no other instances 
of the habit. 

These few jottings of a remote Christian Mass may 
be of interest to some, for any custom there may 
still be left peculiar to the ritual of Antioch — the 
earliest, be it remembered, of all the churches — 
is more certainly preserved here than elsewhere. 
Remote from all other influences, from schisms, 
from progress, and from jealousy alike, the primi- 
tive rites of the Church are more exactly rendered 
at Kottyam than anywhere else in the Christian 
world ; and as one turns out into the blinding sun 
of midday one feels that it was worth any exertion 
to reach to this tiny outcast church, which still 
gallantly upholds the more philosophic but less 
popular version of our common faith. As one 
leans over the low wall of the churchyard and 
surveys the sea of cocoa-nut palms beneath, one 
cannot but recall the persistent rumour that late 
in life Cardinal Newman confessed that Nestorius 
was right and Cyril wrong. The story of Roman 
Catholicisni is pointed by single words. " Filioque " 
lost her the Eastern communion ; " theotokos " 

12 



178 UNDER THE SUN. 

lost her the whole body of Protestants ; to-day 
" gravissimo " bids fair to lose her half of all she 
yet retains at home. But theological discussion is 
out of place among the rank, steaming forests of 
South India. Our dissensions have done much to 
make missionary effort in the country a well- 
meaning failure, which is only tolerated at home 
because of the ignorance of the societies concerned. 
The unfortunate but almost universal result is 
that, except on the Malabar coast, an experienced 
Englishman refuses to engage a Christian servant, 
for reasons which are perfectly well understood 
by his Hindu or Mohammedan fellows. 




m 






QUILON. 



179 



Hyderabad. 



There is, after all, little in Hyderabad itself that 
is of interest other than that which clothes most 
capital towns in India. The fact that the Nizam 
is the premier native chief, and the widest land- 
owner, is, of course, reflected on State occasions by 
a certain barbaric splendour. But the shortness 
of his princely pedigree and the fact that, as a 
Mohammedan, his very presence is a little anoma- 
lous in Southern India deprive him of that un- 
questioned deference which is the natural right of 
a Child of the Sun. The huge estate of Hyderabad 
is a religious enclave cut off by sheer distance from 
those stirring regions of the north-west, with which 
the deepest of all ties would otherwise connect 
it. There is perhaps no small advantage to our- 
selves in this fact. The remoteness of Southern 
India from the centres of interest to-day has 
deprived her of political significance, and the tur- 
bulent fascination of the Carnatic, that appealed 

12* 



iSo UNDER THE SUR 

so strongly to Macaulay, has long passed away, and 
with it has passed away the last vestige of anxiety 
as to anything that the great Mohammedan vassal 
of the British Empire might find it in his mind or 
within his power to do. 

vSo Hyderabad flourishes and waxes fat. The 
streets of her capital are filled with merchandise and 
busy traffickings, and the mere scratching of the 
ground of her sixty million acres provides a decent 
subsistence for her people and wealth for her ruler. 
A trace of the older regime still exists, a mockery of 
its former self. Still the Nizam hunts with the 
cheetah ; still he slips the hawk at its victim ; still 
he shoots at the gold mohur ; and still his elephants 
thrust themselves in an orderly rank through the 
crowds at the palace gates, still waiting for the 
employment that in these days rarely or never 
comes. The glory is departed, and the Nizam ^ 
the cleverest native in all India, and withal one of 
the most dignified, finds time hang heavy on his 
idle hands. He chooses his Ministers well. Now 
and then he descends upon them, and with a clear 
brain and unsparing vigilance tests their work 
whether it be good or bad. So the work goes on, 
not over well, because his Highness cares little for 
domestic reforms and trivial administration : not 



HYDERABAD. i8i 

over badly, because no man knows what the Nizam 
may chance unexpectedly to do from day to day. 
The natural fertility of Hyderabad provides all 
that is necessary, though it is far from what might 
be obtained. And so the Nizam, chafing under the 
day of small things that interest him only as a 
means of asserting still the phantom of his auto- 
cracy, has to find other means of escaping from the 
ennui of his guaranteed prosperity. 

It is said that he rarely goes to Golconda. Per- 
haps the sight of the great fortress — from which his 
predecessor's master drove out a race of real kings, 
men who played the great game on the world's 
stage — reminds him of the dead level of satisfactory 
mediocrity with which he must needs be contented 
in these piping times. Yet Golconda is worth many 
visits. It is another of those towns of which the 
mere names are full of romance. Jewels of great 
Emperors flash in the very consonants. What 
gems these old Indian jewels were ! There are 
legends and records of many : some still remain. 

We have all heard of the six-pound sapphire of 
Muttra and the six-pound three-ounce ruby of 
Somnaut. Shah-Jehan possessed one jewel which 
was valued by Ta vernier at the rather quaint sum 
(in modern terms) of ff>y(^,2^$ i8s. ijd. He also 



i82 UNDER THE SUN. 

possessed the Koh-i-nur^ which then weighed 787I 
carats. These two stones^ however^ may have been 
identical. Ta vernier is not clear on this point. 
His account of the jewels of India is very interesting. 
He makes no comment upon the legends he repeats, 
but is quite business-like when dealing with stones 
he has actually seen. The " Hope " blue diamond 
was brought back to Europe by him. It then 
weighed one hundred and twelve carats. At the 
present moment it only weighs forty -four, but 
this is to be attributed to reckless cutting in Paris, 
where alleged splinters of it are, I believe, still to 
be bought.* Jehangir was offered a five-and-a- 
quarter ounce ruby by the Portuguese. They 
asked five lakhs of rupees, a sum that may approxi- 
mately be represented to-day by two hundred and 
fifty thousand pounds, but Jehangir would not go 
beyond one lakh. Ta vernier makes a reference to 
a certain pearl, originally belonging to the King 
of Persia, which he regards as the finest in existence. 
This is said to be the same as that which, early 
in the last century, found its way into the possession 
of the great Forbes firm in Bombay, and was by them 

* Since writing this sentence, one of these minor stones has been brought very 
prominently before the world by the charge which Mme. de Rodellec de Porzic 
has just withdrawn against M. Greger, her guest at the time when the stone 
was temporarily lost, 



HYDERABAD. 183 

offered to the late Lord Dudley for two thousand 
pounds. For some reason he did not accept the 
offer at the time, but the gem was too tempting, and 
eventually Lord Dudley was obhged to pay nearly 
ten thousand pounds for it. At the distribution 
of Lady Dudley's jewels a few years ago this single 
pearl fetched the sum of thirteen thousand seven 
hundred pounds. Another jewel with an Indian 
record is the large ruby owned by Lady Carew. 
It is about as big as a finger-tip and is uncut. 
Shah-Jehan's name is engraved upon it. The 
Orloff diamond, which is the principal jewel of the 
Russian Regalia, is in all probability the larger 
part of the great diamond of which the Koh-i-nur 
is the smaller. Some jewelled crystals in the green 
vaults in Dresden are also to be traced to the Mogul 
Emperors. A fragment of the " Peacock Throne " 
still exists in Teheran, and the Agra diamond, of a 
faint rose tinge, which caused some litigation a 
few years ago, had a trustworthy Mogul pedigree. 
Tavernier makes a curious reference to the screen 
within the Taj -Mahal. Fantastic as the idea may 
seem, Shah-Jehan originally intended that this 
last protection and ornament for his lost darling 
should be made in the form of a jewelled grape- 
vine climbing over a treUis of rubies and emeralds. 



i84 UNDER THE SUN. 

This was exhibited in the palace within the fort 
after only a few wreaths had been made, and then 
counter-ordered ; and we may congratulate our- 
selves that the mad project was never carried out, 
not only because the present inlaid alabaster is 
infinitely more beautiful, but because, with such loot 
as that within it, it is doubtful indeed whether the 
Taj would have been allowed to remain intact for 
even one generation. It is a remarkable thing that, 
so far as is known, the actual coffins of Mumtaz-i- 
Mahal and of Shah-Jehan, both of which almost 
certainly contain extremely valuable jewels, have 
never been disturbed. 

It is true that diamonds are not found at Gol- 
conda — they never were — true that the halls and 
walls and battlements are overgrown with weeds 
and utterly deserted, but the charm of Golconda 
Rock remains. It lies to the west of the modern 
city of Hyder, some seven miles perhaps by road, 
but a good deal less by the only measurements 
that are true in India, for the road is level and 
smooth, and there is hardly an uninteresting fur- 
long all the way. The dusty compounds of the 
European residents, garish with the transparent 
flares of rocketing purple bougainvillea, or the raw 
scarlet of cannas, fall behind, and, for a little, the 




Aurangzeb's Tomb, Roza. 




Golconda. 



{^Facing page 1 84. 



HYDERABAD. 185 

track crosses the unslaked prairie that will one day 
make Hyderabad a considerable factor in the world's 
grain market. Soon a corner is saved by a short cut 
through his Highnesses fruit gardens, and then the 
main road, which had gone half a mile about to 
the south, carries us again straight on to the outer 
city wall of Golconda town. The gateway is heavily 
fenced with timbered and spiked doors, but, once 
escaped from under it, the road runs again, a white 
and dusty ribbon, to the foot of the Rock. On 
either side are the ruins of Golconda's pleasant 
places — fallen fronts which once sheltered either 
riches or learning, dainty favourites or bronzed 
merchant-venturers ; empty halls, where music or 
high deliberation once reigned ; broken purdahs, 
which need no restoration now by the austerest 
husband in all Islam. The crawling vines of the 
yellow gourd and the feathers of rank nettle-beds 
do their best to hide the desolation, but Golconda, 
save where some group of playing children or the 
whirr of a turning hand-mill betrays a poor home 
among the wreckage of royalty, is one with 
Nineveh. 

At the Bala Hissar gate a knot of the Nizam's 
men spring to attention and demand the pass with- 
out which the Rock may not be visited. It is an 



1 86 UNDER THE SUN. 

idle restriction, for nothing less defensible than 
Golconda exists, but it is an assertion of royal 
rights, and of these the Nizam is rightly jealous. 
For though to our practical selves there may be 
little reason to forbid the freest inspection of such 
antiquated strongholds, the native in his heart 
associates a flash of arbitrary prohibition with the 
possession of power. You will find never a subject 
of his Highness' s save a sentry or a mason on the 
slopes of Golconda Hill. Nothing, however, seems 
repaired except the lower gate. A steep track of 
hacked-out stairs leads up from beside the old 
arsenal walls to the citadel. Green with moss, and 
clothed with weeds, except along a worn, narrow 
track wherein the exposed ridges of rock at the turn 
of the treads show whitely above the reddish drifts 
of soil, the strait steps climb up. Trees spring out 
from crumbling battlements, and empty wells, over- 
hung with mimosa and long lavender-tufted grasses, 
are barely recognisable beside the track. Every 
natural bastion of rock has been roughly shaped 
and worked into the scheme of fortification, some- 
times so deftly that it is hard to distinguish the 
work of men's hands. It looks unfinished, and even 
in the heyday of its pride this mixture of Nature's 
and man's craft must have been untidy. Opposite 



HYDERABAD. 187 

the King's palace rises a huge unshaped pile of rock, 
where the chance visitor still daubs Ganesh in his 
niche with raddle, and leaves a marigold blossom 
or two to rot upon his clumsy lap. From the King's 
throne on the topmost roof of the Palace there is a 
view over seven or eight hundred square miles of 
the Nizam's territory, and the justice of the hack- 
neyed saying that calls these plains, strewn with 
misshapen crags, knolls, and mounds, the frag- 
ments of an earlier world, is apparent. 

To the north stood the famous Tombs of Gol- 
conda. Aurangzeb descended upon the place from 
Daulatabad, and extinguished the Shahi dynasty 
in the end of the seventeenth century. He carried 
back with him poor Thana, the last of his race, and 
allowed him the Chini Mahal, on the slopes of that 
amazing fortress hill, as his prison. It was a useless 
annexation. Aurangzeb, like Alexander^ did but 
prepare the spoil for his generals to divide, and, after 
he had been laid to rest at Roza^ near Ellora, the 
rise of the Nizams of Hyderabad and the Kings of 
Oude was at the cost of his wretched and weak- 
kneed successors upon the Peacock throne. But 
the old dynasty was effectually driven out, and 
these tombs are the sole memorial that its indi- 
vidual princes can claim. Every man, remembering 



i88 UNDER THE SUN. 

his own impatience of his predecessor's vainglory, 
took care to build his own tomb in his own lifetime, 
and even unhappy Thana's cenotaph, unfinished, 
and partly in ruins, can still be seen. Thana 
sleeps beside the rock-cut corkscrew tunnel that 
still is the only entrance to Daulatabad. Aurang- 
zeb put him to death to simplify the pacification of 
Golconda, and probably thought himself uncom- 
monly generous to have allowed his prisoner to live 
in his summer palace, and at his expense, for thirteen 
years. So a Nizam, or " Settlement Officer," was 
appointed, and then in the old way, the viceregent 
Mayor of the Palace became in due time lord of the 
city also. 

Looking down from the height one can trace easily 
enough the four minarets which stand where the 
main streets of Hyderabad meet. A little to the 
right is the huge, irregular block of the old palace ; 
the Nizam lives elsewhere^ but holds an annual 
banquet in his old quarters, whereto European 
visitors are not bidden. Perhaps some violent 
reaction from the wheels of unwelcome progress 
is then celebrated, but the next morning there, 
across at Secunderabad, are still the guardians of 
India's unbroken peace. Not all the twenty thou- 
sand men-at-arms upon whom the Nizam can call 



HYDERABAD. 189 

—some say the number is nearer a lakh — shakes 
the silent and invisible grasp that lies over every 
village of India and three-fourths of the princes 
of India — Hyderabad included — owe their place, 
their fame, their wealth, their powers, their 
very succession, to that un trumpeted fact. Yet 
to a man of the type that holds Golconda and Dau- 
latabad, uneventful assurance and stability can 
never be worth that one crowded hour of glorious 
life that must still tempt at times the inheritor of 
part of the gorgeous empire of the Moguls. His 
Highness knows the situation from every side, and 
recognises that it is all to his own advantage, but 
he would scarcely be worthy of the precedence he 
enjoys over all other chiefs of India if his other 
self did not sometimes yearn for a fair field among 
the clashing interests of Hindustan and no favour 
from his best friend, the British Government. 



I go 



Gwalior. 



Due south from Agra the railway runs to Jhansi. 
Soon after leaving the red sandstone reefs of 
Dholpur, and the curiously ravined and shrivelled 
banks of the Chambal, the country changes. The 
row-ridged fields of drifted and drifting sand give 
way to sparse patches of arable. The inevitable 
ak plant has been driven away from the little lots 
in which millet and Indian corn are sown and 
watered almost with the care that is bestowed 
upon a garden at home. Deep in the bed of wide 
nullahs every square yard of irrigable soil is utilised 
and agriculture is at higher pressure the farther 
south one goes. One feels the coming of a strong 
man's influence. At last, out of the bosom of 
the flat, dry, cultivated plain rises a gigantic flat 
rock, two miles in length, and in breadth varying 
between two hundred and one thousand yards. 

To those who know Chitor the resemblance 
of Gwalior to the old citadel of Me war is striking. 



GWALIOR. 191 

Except that Chitor is considerably longer, the 
general likeness is undeniable. In each case a 
huge rocky prominence rises abruptly from the 
flat plain to a height of about three hundred feet. 
On all sides the descent is precipitous, and a heavy 
and well-loopholed wall runs round the crest of 
each. Entrance is obtained by the slants of a 
road cut in the solid rock, and guarded by several 
strongly-fortified gateways. But Gwalior is more 
than a fort. It is true, that for five hundred years 
its chief importance lay in the fact that it pre- 
sented the first barrier to an advance southwards 
from Agra ; but since 1886, when the British troops, 
which had held it intermittently for over one hun- 
dred years, were finally withdrawn, its real signifi- 
cance has been rather archaeological than military. 
The Maharaja Scindia has, indeed, a few hundred 
men in the old defences on the top of the rock, 
but no one knows better than his Highness that 
the day of impregnability is over for such fortresses 
as Gwalior, and that in his splendidly-trained 
Imperial Service troops, quartered in the plain 
below, he has a weapon far worthier of his pre- 
decessors' fighting fame. 

On the back of an elephant — Palace and Re- 
sidency alike point an Anglo-Indian proverb for 



192 UNDER THE SUN. 

hospitality — one see-saws strenuously and slowly 
up the steep ascent to the main gate beside the 
Painted Palace. This is a fine structure, simply 
designed in the mass and decorated in detail with 
tiles of an exquisite glaze, some charged with an 
elephant, such a beast as the designer of the Bayeux 
tapestry might have traced, some splendid with 
blue and green peacocks, others diapered with con- 
ventional work in free and bold curves. Others 
again — and these are perhaps the most impressive 
of any — are of plain pure colour, set in bands or 
surfaces of utter blue so exactly of the colour of 
the deep mid sky overhead that they seem to make 
symmetrical gaps and rents and spaces in the solid 
stone of the palace wall. Inside there is indeed 
something to see and admire, some finely-chiselled 
capital brackets and latticed windows in the 
women's court, some dainty finials also along the 
parapet, but the foul sweet stench of the bat 
battalions who have had undisturbed possession 
of the inner rooms for centuries will drive away 
the hardiest of intruders. There is something 
apart from all other smells in that of a bat haunt. 
You may be prepared for, and even proof against, 
the more violent stenches of life ; you may even 
be almost deficient in a sense of smell at all, but 




SRIRANGAM. 



GWALIOR. 193 

this particular warm, intimate odour, that you 
will taste on the palate for ten minutes after- 
wards, and long to be sick therefor — this will 
yet drive you headlong. It is half psychological 
in its effect ; one could swear that in the dark- 
ness there was crouching some warm-blooded 
creature of the octopus tribe ; in fact, the origin 
of the vampire legend is clearly founded upon 
the suggestions of this fetid smell rather than 
upon the ascertained habits of those foul little 
beasts, which have long made Gwalior their chief 
capital in India. 

On the flat top of the rock, and cut into its 
flanks, there are several things of interest. All 
the world knows of the gigantic statues, nude and 
unashamed, that excited Baber's modest anger, 
but, more accessible than these, there are collected 
in a little compound a hundred and one relics of 
a Buddhist age. Buddhist or Jain — who knows ? 
The two are first cousins, and it is hard sometimes 
to disentangle the fragments that are left of the 
two faiths. Truth to tell^ some of these quaint 
sculptures might have been carved in Egypt, or in 
Siam, or in Ireland, as readily as here in Central 
India. The bigger statues cut in the side of the 
precipice are comparatively modern — some are even 

13 



194 UNDER THE SUN. 

dated as late as the fifteenth century. Looking 
over the strong breastwork of stone which sur- 
rounds the fort one sees the new town of Lash- 
kar lying, white and new, in among the well irri- 
gated and afforested lands below. Here is the 
real Gwalior of to-day. The page is turned for 
ever on all that make the rock splendid and san- 
guinary in history, and in Lashkar the advent of 
a new era is blazoned forth. And the most striking 
part of Lashkar is nothing less than the Maharaja 
himself. 

Scindia is, beyond all question, the most ca- 
pable and most ambitious native chief in our 
Indian Empire. With a mental dexterity and 
wealth of information that might be envied by 
many an expert " political " twice his age, he 
combines an industry which has no rival, un- 
fortunately also scarcely a follower, in other 
States. Nothing that can interest or affect his 
wide territory is left unnoticed by the Maharaja 
of Gwalior. Nothing is too small or too petty 
to escape his direct attention and action. In 
the course of one short afternoon I remember his 
discussing the drainage of an unhealthy quarter 
of Lashkar; the course and prospects of yet another 
proposed light railway ; the financial position of 



GWALIOR. 195 

the club ; a new electric power station ; the proper 
collection and distribution of forage for his Imperial 
Service troops ; the destructions necessitated by the 
new market — the exact matter was the abolition of 
some adjacent stables lest the flies should spoil 
the wares of the worthy confectioners of Gwalior ; 
a patch of bad road some ten miles out towards 
Datia, for which the local overseer would have 
to supply the best of explanations ; an improve- 
ment in electric thermantidotes invented by his 
Highness which caused an even breeze rather 
than a draught, and the lessons of the Russo- 
Japanese war. Such a list, incomplete as it is, 
will show the versatility and insatiable activity 
of this man, the only prince, and almost the only 
man, in all India who adds to the nimble wit which 
is not uncommon there those rarest of all qualities 
in a Southern Asiatic — the powers of initiative, 
foresight, determination, and perseverance. He has 
put the past behind him. I asked an official at 
the palace about the famous Gwalior pearls ; it 
seemed only obvious to ask about them. They 
are beyond question the finest in the world, even 
Travancore's ranking second to these ropes and 
collars and sashes of exquisitely-matched sea- 
stones, each as large as a filbert, and ideally perfect 

13* 



196 UNDER THE SUN. 

in shape. The official saddened visibly. " Ah, 
his Highness will take no care of them ; he will 
not wear them, and so they must go bad." Cer- 
tainly, it required some stretch of imagination to 
clothe in the translucent breast-plates of pearl 
which his predecessor's picture bravely shows, the 
sturdy and alert figure which has just been driving 
about in a motor from one municipal improve- 
ment to another, confident, certain of touch, and, 
a notable thing in India, ever mindful of the life 
and limbs of the most tiresome of pariah dogs 
asleep in the fairway. 

Yet the matter I have mentioned last is closest 
to his heart. At home or on his travels you will 
always find beside him ready to his hand the last 
book upon the science and theory of war. He is a 
soldier first and last. His own troops are models 
of discipline and organisation, and to the fact 
that they are his own, not ours, till the day for 
their employment comes, his never-failing interest 
in them is due. Some time ago he received a letter 
asking him to become honorary colonel of some corps 
of Central Indian horse. I heard him refuse bitterly. 
" Honorary colonel ? No ; what's the use of 
that ? It won't bring me a step nearer active 
service. Now, if they had offered me the post of 



GWALIOR. 197 

squadron commander instead — — " His shoulders 
completed the sentence. 

There is another matter. It cannot be doubted 
for a moment that Scindia's position in India, 
as acknowledged head and champion of all Hindu 
native States, is one that is yearly more and more 
to be recognised and reckoned with by us. It is 
no light thing that Rajput and Mahratta alike 
come to him for advice and leading. The signi- 
ficance is doubled when we remember that this 
involves at least one concession of no small im- 
portance, for Scindia is not of the royal Kshatriya 
caste, and he has won his pre-eminence by sheer 
abiUty and force of character. One could write 
much upon this man, who is, on the whole, the most 
remarkable character in India. Perhaps he errs 
on the side of over-attention to detail ; it would 
be better to leave minor matters in responsible 
hands. Perhaps, also, his energy needs concen- 
tration on fewer interests, if results are to be perma- 
nent. But Scindia is either a great man or, if 
not, he is at least the greatest man both of and 
in India. 



198 



Cawnpore. 



Most people in India will assure you that Cawn- 
pore is not worth going to see, unless, indeed, you 
are interested in the manufacture of tents and 
kaki. I suppose for the most part this is true. 
For the majority of people the gift of imagination 
is happily rather an uncommon one, and in this 
particular case, while on the one hand the unima- 
ginative person would only be bored by memories 
and alike factories, for him, on the other, who can 
reconstruct in some measure the past, there is no 
more awful city in all the world than Cawnpore. 

The Indian Mutiny of 1857 is beginning already 
to be an unsubstantial tale. It is not yet fifty 
years since that Sunday morning at Meerut, but 
for all that Anglo-India cares, or even remembers, 
it might be five hundred. Fifty years ! Old men 
— and for that matter men not over middle-age — 
remember the terror that used to come into the 
eyes of natives who had seen our vengeance. It 



CAWNPORE. 199 

is a good thing that this is gone. It is not a good 
thing that fooUshness in high places in England 
should delude natives into thinking that their 
punishment would be one whit the less were history 
to repeat itself to-morrow. Every now and then 
in some club in London, or where some long-retired 
veteran is revisiting the scenes of his life's work in 
India, you may catch still the echoes of that fearful 
time. It is more, perhaps, the way in which these 
old men regard 1857 than any stories they will care 
to tell. It is a fact soon realised by those who are 
anxious to gather the truth, while yet there are 
survivors, that those who passed through the 
Mutiny are those who will speak least and wish to 
think least about it. I do not suppose that any 
man of the force which avenged the massacres 
of Cawnpore has ever wished to revisit the scene. 
Elsewhere there is, at least, some record of success- 
ful heroism. Delhi and Lucknow stir the blood 
with memories of great deeds achieved, and heavy 
though our losses were, no one could fail to see 
that our hold on India, and, therefore, our power 
of doing good, is based directly and splendidly 
upon the fighting and the turmoil at these two 
places. But though there was heroism enough, 
God knows, at Cawnpore, there is not from end to 



200 UNDER THE SUN. 

end one single ray of success to lighten the ghastly 
story. 

Do you know the tale ? Have you ever cared 
or dared to reconstruct that awful scene ? Go 
out from the factories towards the river and turn 
into the quiet of the great circular garden that 
now surrounds the well. Your horses will be reined 
in between the black gates of the garden, and 
at a walk, as though still following the funeral 
of those that lie there, you will pass on between 
branching trees and flowering shrubs, footed by 
red roses for England and rosemary for eternal 
remembrance. At last you will reach the mound 
which marks the spot of the well. We are a strange 
people. Perhaps we were right so entirely to alter 
the appearance of that awful courtyard. But the 
cheap German Gothic screen and claptrap angel 
who stands with crossed palm branches over the 
well-head might surely have been spared to those 
who hold the ground sacred. Another curious piece 
of foolishness is the rule which forbids the presence 
within the screen of a native veteran who wears 
the red and white Mutiny ribbon, which, on the 
breast of a native, ranks in Indian honour scarcely 
after the V.C. on a white man's tunic, and admits 
within it that miserable class whose cowardice 



CAWNPORE. 20I 

and treachery has been exposed a hundred times, 
the so-called converts to missionary Christianity. 
But there is one entirely good thing here, and it 
is one of the best of a class which either by accident 
or by that touch of genius which days of national 
stress begets, was almost always great. Everyone 
knows the epitaphs upon the graves of Henry 
Lawrence and Hodson. This is as good. Of course, 
the well-head itself, a great circle of meaningless 
stone diapered and scarified with pattern exactly 
where simplicity would seem to have been obvious, 
is in the same deplorable state as the angel and the 
screen ; but the inscription round it is almost 
perfect. 

** Sacred to the perpetual memory of a 
great company of Christian People, chiefly 
women and children, who near this spot 
were cruelly massacred by the followers 
of the rebel Nana Dhoondopunt of Bithoor, 
and cast the dying with the dead into the 
well below on the XVth day of July, 
MDCCCLVII." 

It is almost inconceivable that the persons who 
possessed the infinitely good taste to write this 



202 UNDER THE SUN. 

plain, unembittered statement of the crime should 
have allowed the atrocious decoration of the spot 
to be carried out. As a matter of fact, there is only 
one statue in existence which entirely fills the 
requirements of the well at Cawnpore. It is 
Chantrey's work in the Stanhope Chapel at 
Chevening, in Kent, and those who have seen it 
will know why. 

" Women and children Nana." There 

is the truth of the whole thing. There is the reason 
why men who knew it will not even to-day speak of 
the Indian Mutiny. More than all other places on 
earth, the well of Cawnpore has the gift of clair- 
voyance to bestow. If you will but be very quiet 
and humble, it may be given to you, too, to realise 
something that you have never understood before. 
Go and sit down in the shade of the trees forty 
yards away and then perhaps you will understand. 
I do not recommend the sentimentalist and the 
soft-hearted to challenge this experience. There 
are many people in the world like the lady in the 
** Heavenly Twins," who would drive a mile round 
rather than help the victims of an ugly accident. 
Yet in your turn, and in your degree, you may be 
able to understand our work in India a little better 
if you have the heart to go through this ordeal. 



CAWNPORE. 203 

Tlie sun is hot upon the trim, well-watered roads 
of the garden, and the Enghsh flowers dance merrily 
in their carefully tended beds. There is a light 
leaf-clashing wind in the tops of the mulberry trees, 
but you must fix your eyes and not let your atten- 
tion wander from just one bright white prominence 
on the carving of the screen. Before long you will 
find that the screen is growing a little dim before 
your gaze. The details are being lost in an ab- 
sorbent veil of gauze. After a while the white 
angel herself, clear for a moment as the screen 
seems to drift away in the haze of a mirage, becomes 
misty, and after rippling like a taut flag in a breeze 
for a mmute, she, too, fades away and is gone, 
while beneath her the low green knoll itself is dis- 
sipated into the white glare of the morning sun, 
wherein the turf and gay flowers of the garden 
have vanished too. There is a sense of oppression 
— the sense of the nearness of houses and crowding 
people, and slowly in the space thus cleared there 
is compacted a shape — the thick squat mouth of a 
common well. It is round, and it rises some 
eighteen inches above the ground. It is, perhaps, 
four feet across within from lip to lip ; there are 
three low steps on one side. Almost between it 
and yourself a triple-stemmed pipal hangs for a 



204 UNDER THE SUN. 

moment like a wraith and then is quietly material- 
ised. It grows from a single root banked up high 
with earth. You may see where the much sitting 
of gossiping women has polished a projecting 
root. To the left, as you now see, stands the 
" House of the Woman." It is a low quadrangle 
of brick and plaster. Inside, as one vaguely 
knows from having been there, is an arcaded 
court. In the centre of it grows a single neem- 
tree. You can see the upper branches of it from 
where you sit overpassing the long, low roof. 
The side of the house that looks upon the court- 
yard towards the well is pierced by five windows. 
Everything is very silent. 

If ever you wish to speak again of the Indian 
Mutiny with as light a heart as you have spoken 
of it in the past, you had better rouse yourself from 
the trance and go. Already the sense of horror 
and blood is thickening on all you see as once it 
thickened in the sight of Beatrice Cenci. A quick 
light laugh from an upper window behind you makes 
you quiver to the quick of your nails. The whine 
of a nautch begins again. If you will see this 
thing through — there is yet time to go — you will 
see the corners of the courtyard gradually fill with 
dark faces, and you will see three men make their 



CAWNPORE. 205 

way across it and open the door of the " House of 
the Woman." It may be that you know the story 
of the evening and the morning which made up 
that day of cold-blooded slaughter of women and 
children ; it may be that you have read all that 
has ever been written by man about the Massacre 
of Cawnpore, but till you have seen this you will 
never wholly have understood. Of course, you 
know from the printed words in a book what hap- 
pened ; you know what you have been told of the 
sight within the house on that sunny morning. 
You know how the sword-cuts that missed their 
aim and spent themselves upon the wooden pillars 
inside were all low down near the floor. You knew 
that about two hundred women and children were 
butchered, and knew that, smothered in the red 
heaps, some of the English women Hved still, but 
not that that hacked and multilated mother still 
defended her child just so — you never thought that 
that five-year-old boy, with red matted golden 
hair and eyes awake with terror was so like your 
own. Two dark figures are telling him to run fast 
and escape round the corner where a red sword is 
waiting for him, and you see the single slash that 
leaves the child headless and quivering on the 
ground. You will see the dragging out of Enghsh 



2o6 UNDER THE SUN. 

women from the house, happiest they whose faces 
have long been set hard by death. One by onci 
they are thrown into the well, and those that are 
living still are not even killed before they too are 
thrown down. One of the last bodies is that of 
the young English girl who only yesterday faced 
Nana Sahib himself, and reproached him for this 
return for all the kindness he had received from 
Englishmen. Meanwhile the native soldiers of the 
rebel who had refused last night to do his foul 
work are shot down, pistolled at close range. I 
like to think that some of these men were thrown 
down the well and still lie there in that honourable 
company. The drone of the day-long nautch ordered 
by Nana Sahib whines still from the women's 
quarters. 

Do you now wonder at the scene that took place 
two days later when the Scotch non-commissioned 
officer and twenty men of Neill's relieving force 
burst their way into the courtyard. It is a strange 
story, one of the few that I have ever had reluc- 
tantly told me by a survivor of the Mutiny. There 
was a minute's silence — dead silence. The sergeant 
moved up to the wall of the "Woman's House," 
and from it he picked off a little tangled mat 
of woman's hair, held together by the drying mass 



CAWNPORE. 207 

of her own blood. Very solemnly and reverently 
he divided it into portions, as though it had been 
the Bread of the Sacrament. Still in the awful 
silence he went down his little company, giving each 
man one portion, and as he did so he repeated gently 
to each : '* One life for every hair before the sun sets." 
There is hardly a more awful scene in history. 

You will miss all the meaning of Cawnpore if 
you do not understand what the incident meant to 
these dour, silent Scotsmen, who that evening 
stayed their just hands when and not before the 
tale of lives was accomplished. They knew them- 
selves to be the instruments of a vengeance that 
was not the vengeance of man. With no uncer- 
tain voice the voices of the murdered women and 
children of Cawnpore cried to the stern, religious, 
upright General Neill and his men from Madras. 
There never was a more righteous or conscientious 
man in command of troops, yet all the world 
knows how he brought in the high-class Brahmins, 
who had aided and abetted the escaped devil Nana, 
and before their death made them, with their hands 
tied behind their backs, lick clean with their 
tongues the appointed three square inches of the 
bloody floor of the room, thus damning them in 
eternity as well as life. 



2o8 UNDER THE SUN. 

So Cawnpore is dull ! Believe me, there is no 
bastion of Delhi, no broken house at Lucknow, 
not even the well two miles away within the privet 
hedge that marks Wheeler's pitiful dykes — not one, 
not all of these tells the reason of the silence that 
is upon the lips of the men of eighteen-fifty-seven 
half so well as this low mound of grass. 

Yes, people are forgetting many things, and 
many things it is good that they should forget, 
but it is not good that all should be forgotten. To 
this day there is hardly an official in India who has 
not the materials for another greased cartridge 
ready at his elbow on his writing-desk ; and for all 
such, it is just as well if at some time in their Indian 
career they should make occasion to go to Cawn- 
pore and understand the things that belong unto 
our great inheritance. We need not speak of them 
overmuch, but there is a danger that our tendency 
towards eternal forbearance may once again be 
misconstrued and breed another black soul like his 
who on the sixth day of December, 1857, disap- 
peared from history in a flight of dust along the 
road that led to his own place — Bithur. 



209 



Amritsar. 



Now it happened once upon a time that the Moham- 
medan conquerors grievously oppressed the Punjab. 
For many years, owing to the timidity or to the 
want of organisation of the Hindus, no resistance 
was offered, and the whole country groaned beneath 
the oppression of the infidels, until in the process 
of time a man, called Nanak Singh, of Lahore, 
determined, even at the cost of his life, to put an 
end to this misery. 

For this purpose, he needed a small band of men, 
upon whose courage and strength of mind he could 
entirely rely, and, after taking much thought, he 
set to work to secure this small company in a way 
which was characteristically Eastern. One day he 
finished his meditations, and told his wife to collect 
into the house secretly seven goats and keep them 
in an inner room. When this had been done 
Nanak, with his face and beard smeared with ashes, 
brandishing an enormous sword and foaming at 

14 



2IO UNDER THE SUN. 

the mouth, ran out of his house into the market- 
place, crying aloud, *' Who will be a Sikh ? Who 
will be a Sikh ? " Now there was no such thing as 
a Sikh in those days, and, not knowing what he 
meant, the good people of Lahore fled in terror from 
his path, thinking that the finger of God was on 
him. But at last, as he continued for the space of 
half an hour shouting and foaming at the mouth, 
and brandishing his great sword, and crying out, 
" Who will be a Sikh ? " there came up the street 
to him a man, who said, " For me, I am tired of 
the misery and oppression of this world. I do not 
much care how the end may come. I will come with 
you. I will be a Sikh." 

So Nanak Singh leapt upon him, and dragged him 
strongly with him into his house, and the people 
peeped from their house-tops and shuddered at the 
sight. And then they took courage and came again 
down into the streets. But Nanak took the man and 
put him in a room by himself. Then he called for a 
goat, which he slew, and he scattered the blood all 
over his face and body and over the face and body 
of the man. Then again he rushed forth into the 
market-place, far more horrible than before, with 
blood matting his hair and dripping from his sword, 
and still he cried out, *' Who also will become a 



AMRITSAR. 211 

Sikh ? " And the people, thinking that he had 
killed his disciple, cried out upon him and ran again 
from his path. But in no long time there came up 
to him another man, whom the oppression of the 
Moguls had wearied of life, and he said thus and 
thus, saying also, *' I, too, will become a Sikh." 
And Nanak seized him and dragged him into 
the house, and he did as before, and killed another 
goat, and smeared himself again with fresh blood. 
Thus did Nanak Singh six times, and even then, 
though his body and face were all clotted and 
clogged with gore, he found yet another man, who 
said, " I also am willing to become a Sikh." Then 
Nanak Singh returned into his house with this 
last disciple, and gathered together his little band of 
seven followers, and to each of them he gave a sword, 
and they took an oath that they would never rest 
till they had thrown off the yoke of the Moham- 
medans. Then, when they had done this, all eight 
of them rushed suddenly out of the house together, 
and they slew in the city until sunset, sparing neither 
man nor woman nor child of the accursed infidel 
faith. And men gathered to them from all sides 
and took the oath, and they also went out into 
the by-ways slaying Mohammedans. 

Thus, as their own gurus say, was the faith 

14* 



212 UNDER THE SUN. 

founded. After this they formed themselves into 
a band of fighting men joined together in a rehgious 
sect. They affirmed that God is one, that the 
worship of idols is abominable, and that all men are 
equal in the sight of God. These praiseworthy 
sentiments have become slightly weakened in the 
course of years : caste has crept in among them to 
some extent, and it is doubtful whether many idols 
in the world are as sincerely worshipped as the 
Granth-Sahib in the Golden Temple of Amritsar, 
the Holy Book of the Sikhs. They are intolerant 
of heretics, though they have a certain fellow- 
sympathy with the English as non-Mohammedans 
who — so far as they see them — are bred to the art 
of war. The tourist who is admitted within the 
walls of the Golden Temple of Amritsar must, how- 
ever, enter by a side door. For most of us this is 
a small deprivation, but, considering that a similar 
restriction in force at Delhi in the Jama-Musjid is 
relaxed for the Viceroy and for members of the 
Imperial House, it was rightly not thought advisable 
that the Prince of Wales during his late tour 
through India should view the Golden Temple 
subject to this or any other condition. An ordinary 
visitor may go and, if he wishes for them, may even 
receive the prayers of this Church Militant by the 




The Treasury Square, Amritsar. 



\Facing page 212. 



AMRITSAR. 213 

easy process of subscribing two or three rupees 
to the funds of the faith. He will then have the 
curious privilege of having his name and the exact 
amount of his gift cried aloud by the guru or priest 
in attendance, that all the long-dead priestly 
warriors of the sect may know that Jenkinson 
Sahib has in his generation and after his ability, 
done a kindness and a favour to the faith. 

The ornamentations on the walls are exceedingly 
fine, but there is a certain lack of reality about this 
religious pavilion which strikes even a careless 
visitor. The truth is that the Sikhs are first and 
foremost a fighting race, and, therefore, it is left 
for those unfit by age for active service to carry on 
at its centre the religious practices of the faith. 
The ordinary Sikh regards the daily recitation of 
the Granth as a kind of worship vastly inferior to 
that of thrusting his blade " through the teeth of the 
strong blasphemer." Inured to hardship and accus- 
tomed to assume responsibility at a moment's 
notice, they are a splendid race. Not only do they 
form the backbone of the Indian Army, but it is 
hardly an exaggeration to say that they police Asia 
also. Next to the London policeman, with his 
outstretched arm, there is no more significant vision 
of the force of law upon earth than an impassive, 



214 UNDER THE SUN. 

bearded, six-foot Sikh, entirely careless of the 
gesticulating impatience of a crowd of Chinamen 
in Hong Kong or Rangoon. It would take too long 
to trace the fortunes of the Sikhs from their stern 
origin to the day when, under Ranjit Singh, they 
bade fair to share with us the Imperial crown of 
India. To-day they and the Rajputs are the 
loyallest of the races of the Eastern Empire, but 
those who know them best realise that under the 
decorous exterior of the best trained Sikh there 
still lurks the spirit of those who in 1765 captured 
Lahore and made their Mohammedan prisoners 
wash the floors of their own mosques with the 
blood of pigs. 

There is a story told among them, and firmly 
believed, that is not without its special interest for 
the Englishman. 

Once upon a time there were three gurus, who 
sat together and meditated upon the truths of their 
religion. They were holy men, and had times 
without number withstood the arguments of Islam. 
And as they thus meditated, there was brought 
to them a large bowl of milk, which was set down 
upon the flags of the court in which they sat. The 
time was not yet come for their midday refresh- 
ment, and the morning's visit had to be paid to the 



AMRITSAR. 215 

Durbar Sahib or Golden Temple. Therefore, leaving 
the bowl of milk on the flags, the three gurus went 
away to make their obeisance in the holy pavilion. 
While they were gone a venomous snake crept from 
a hole in the wall and slipped within the bowl of 
milk. This was clearly a devil sent from Mecca, 
for his purpose was nothing less than that he should 
bite and kill the first guru who put his lips to the 
bowl. 

But from another corner of the courtyard a 
small black frog had seen the wickedness of the 
snake, and she argued within herself, ** What shall 
I do ? For I am weak and powerless, and cannot 
drive the snake away, and yet I alone know that 
the first guru that shall drink of the milk will surely 
die." So she made up her mind, and in the sun- 
shine hopped across the courtyard and leapt into the 
bowl of milk. And the snake, perceiving her in- 
tention, bit her and straightway she died. At that 
moment the gurus returned from their prayers. 
And as it was now time for their refreshment, they 
approached the bowl of milk, and were horrified to 
find the frog floating upon it. And they marvelled, 
for they saw that the frog was dead. And while 
they marvelled, one of them tipped up the bowl 
and spilt the milk, which they could not now drink, 



2i6 UNDER THE SUN. 

upon the flags of the courtyard, and at the bottom 
of the bowl they saw the snake, and they under- 
stood the matter. 

Then they searched the holy books, and they dis- 
covered beyond all cavil or doubt that the frog 
which had done this noble thing had been foretold 
for many ages, and was destined to be reborn as the 
greatest woman in all the world, and that supreme 
power and grace and long life and godliness should 
all be hers. And that is why in all love and 
reverence every Sikh believes that in her previous 
reincarnation their Empress Victoria was a little 
black frog. 

From a modern point of view, I am not sure that 
the medical work done in Amritsar is not as in- 
teresting as anything there. The statistics of plague 
prevention show that more successful work is being 
done here than elsewhere in India, but the hospitals 
of the town should be visited. I went with Davys to 
see Colonel Hendley at work. He was operating 
upon cataract, and that morning had sixteen cases 
— " About the usual number," he remarked. He 
is possibly the first cataract operator living, and 
no wonder. He has had experience which in all 
probability no other surgeon has ever had or can 
ever have, except at this centre. Indeed, in twelve 




iSikh devotees at Amritsar, 



[FactJig page 216. 



kh. 



AMRITSAR. 217 

months Colonel Hendley has a larger practice than 
many of the most noted oculists of Europe can claim 
in ten years. There was one fine old havildar with 
three medals, whose turn had just come. He 
saluted and with military precision he obeyed 
the surgeon's instructions, and placed himself 
motionless on the table. Even for ourselves, an 
operation is always a little bit of a jump in the 
dark, and it is mightily to the credit of the British 
Raj that even in these matters our surgeons have 
come to be entirely trusted by the caste-ridden 
and foreigner-hating races of India. Colonel Hen- 
dley in a minute reported another successful 
operation. 

But there was a touching little incident that 
morning. There always is in India. Let it never 
be forgotten that India is the saddest country in the 
world. Close under the tinsel edges of its luxury 
and show, there is always to be found, there has 
always been found, a depth of misery, against 
which administration and charity are alike power- 
less. Nay, our schemes to reduce the old accepted 
mortality from famine and pestilence do but in- 
crease the over-population, which is the first cause 
of all the trouble. We must be true to our trust, 
but it is folly to ignore some of the results of our 



2i8 UNDER THE SUN. 

altruism. While I was there a small girl of about 
eight was carried in in her father's arms. Colonel 
Hendley was busy and another surgeon made a rapid 
inspection of the child's eyes. With a word of en- 
couragement he passed on. This was not his busi- 
ness. The child's features were refined and even 
beautiful, and I asked him casually what the matter 
was. " Smallpox pustules/' said he, " formed over 
the pupils of both eyes ; case, I fear, hopeless." 
He went on after a moment's pause : ** They'll 
make away with that child. They'll never be able 
to get her a husband if she remains blind, so — she 
will go." I had once more found a case of the 
one inexpugnable prejudice of India. Against this, 
Western methods and commands break themselves 
vainly. Whatever may be told the officials, what- 
ever the native Congress may claim in proof of 
advancing civilisation, the fact remains that India 
does not want girl babies and will not put itself 
to the cost of bringing them up unless there is 
some fair certainty of their getting married. In 
seven villages in the Basti district it was recently 
found that there were one hundred and four boys 
and only one girl. 

I also went out to Tarn Taran, where Dr. Guilford 
took me over the leper settlement. We hear much 



AMRITSAR. 219 

about Father Damien in the South Seas, but here, 
beneath our eyes, unnoticed and unpraised, there 
is being given a personal devotion that is hardly 
less than his. Besides being the first authority 
upon the Sikh religion and history, Dr. Guilford is 
the resident physician of the leper settlement at 
Tarn Taran. This refuge dates back to the time 
of Arjan Singh, who compiled the Adi Granth and 
was himself a leper. As usual a little crop of pic- 
turesque legends springs up round the still waters of 
the tank here. One strangely modern in tone is 
that of its discovery. A poor woman, the wife of 
a leper, came crying bitterly to Arjan, saying that, 
helpless and repulsive as her husband had been, she 
had yet loved him and cared for him, and that he 
had fallen into the tank at Tarn Taran, and out of 
it again had come a man, young and clean and in 
the prime of life, who called her wife. But she had 
rather have once again her old unclean husband, 
whom she knew, and who was bound to her by a 
thousand ties of helplessness. 

There is little or nothing horrible at this settle- 
ment ; only an intense and all-absorbing pity over- 
comes one for those wretched men and women 
upon whom destiny has borne so heavily. The 
" leonine " symptoms are rare here, the hands and 



220 UNDER THE SUN. 

feet suffer most. One feels an even more over- 
whelming compassion for the children. These 
children of leper parents are born as clean in the 
blood as any in Mayfair. Until the age of eight, or 
thereabouts, they play about in the settlements 
without a taint, and could they be taken away early 
their cleanness would be almost certain. But in 
India the non-caste English may not take away 
children from their parents. For the best reason 
in the world — and is not this the best ? — it would 
be still an intolerable outrage. So these children 
remain, and one day Dr. Guilford will find on the 
little brown back a curious pattern like a map, in a 
somewhat darker tint than the rest of the flesh. 
After that the child is doomed, and no care or skill 
on earth can save him. It is a miserable remem- 
brance that one takes away from Tarn Taran. One 
of the last things one passes is the open-sided church, 
with its luffer-boards in place of glass. For this 
there is, alas, reason enough. Out in the open air 
one notices little, but once shut up in a room with 
lepers the offensive smell is overpowering, and 
even the stout heart of the Doctor quailed a little 
before this ventilated church was built. 

The road back to Amritsar is almost straight. 
To the right one can see the first beginnings of the 



AMRITSAR. 221 

new light railroad, which will go far to open up this 
almost unvisited part of the Punjab. It is curious 
to see native navvies working two hundred yards 
away at their most modern of all tasks, while beside 
the road stands the obelisk that marks the spot 
where the great Guru's head was taken off by the 
infidel enemies. Through them, however, headless 
as he was, he still hacked his victorious way for 
four miles to the gates of Amritsar, leaving behind 
him a wake of dead. If you want legends of India, 
go to the Punjab, and as you idly drive along be- 
tween the fields of cotton or maize, with the sickle- 
winged parrokeets cutting lines of curving green 
fire in front of you, you will be as ready to believe 
them — as willing, at any rate, to let them go un- 
questioned — as any child of this much-disputed 
soil. 



222 



Bikanir. 



This is a strange place indeed. If the dry tides of 
the great Indian desert are now threatening the 
green luxuriance of Jaipur^ Bikanir stands like 
another Rockall in the full bosom of that glaring 
and waterless expanse. Here there are no trees, 
except a few meagre bebel thorns and here and 
there a row of dusty nasturtiums cherished with an 
extravagance that is almost sinful from the scanty 
sources of Bikanir water. It is the wells here which 
bring home to one first the appalling arid desolation 
of this artificial town. Every traveller in India 
has gone through the mild fascination caused by the 
never-ending climb and descent of the bullocks 
drawing water from a well. The principle is as 
simple as anything can well be. The mussuk, or 
heavy leather bucket, is helped out of the well by 
gravitation. The bullocks probably find it quite 
as irksome to reclimb up the slant, when the 
mussuk is emptied and is again descending for 



BIKANIR. 223 

another load, as to pull up the seventy or eighty 
pounds of water during their returning downward 
carr}/. This slant, of course, is in direct proportion 
to the depth of the surface of the water. In general, 
these slants are from fifteen to twenty yards long. 
At Bikanir the water is three hundred feet below the 
surface of the soil, and, of course, to pull up the 
water the bullocks have to go and return an equi- 
valent journey every time the mussuk rises to the 
top of the well and descends again. The accom- 
panying illustration will show the extraordinary 
labour that is thus performed by these patient 
beasts. Under these circumstances, it is with diffi- 
culty that enough water is secured for the mere 
purpose of quenching the thirst of the good in- 
habitants of Bikanir. 

Their ceremonial ablutions must be seriously 
curtailed. The accepted description of Bikanir by 
the globe-trotter is an " oasis." This is a wrong 
use of the word. There is no visible water. 
There is nothing to justify, or even make possible, 
the presence of a town in the centre of this vast 
waste of gravel and sand, except the underground 
springs, which afford a bare subsistence for the 
descendants of those who in other days fled before 
the land-wasting of two successive conquerors. 



224 UNDER THE SUN. 

His Highness the Maharaja of Bikanir has two 
titles. The first is King of the Desert — a reference 
to a curious old story that Bikanir only came to the 
help of his brother Rajputs on the famous campaign 
against the Mogul power in Gujerat on condition 
that for one day he was acclaimed by this high- 
sounding title. The last occasion on which it was 
ceremoniously accorded to him was on the date of 
the departure of the present Maharaja to take 
part with his men in the campaign for the relief of 
the Pekin Legation in igoo. Then the railway 
station of Calcutta resounded with cries of this 
splendid title, raised in no small part by the local 
banias. The second title which his Highness enjoys 
in popular parlance is that of the King of the Banias. 
At first sight, anything less congruous than the 
city - haunting, account - keeping, and somewhat 
petty-souled race of usurers and the strong, indepen- 
dent and open-air loving men of the great desert 
can hardly be imagined. But a walk through the 
streets of Bikanir will supply the missing link. 
The banias along the west of India, like the Jews in 
Europe and the Armenians in Asia-Minor, commer- 
cially akin, have in their turn experienced the same 
fate of persistent persecution. So bitter was this at 
one time, that the banias of the wealthier class 



m 




»0 



o 



BIKANIR 225 

migrated to this inaccessible spot, and the abun- 
dance of beautifully-built red stone houses in this 
arid outpost of human life is one of the most re- 
markable things about Bikanir. 

The walls of the town are still in good preserva- 
tion, and one of the gates remains to this day un- 
touched over two hundred years. It is a tempting 
subject for a sketch. The cusped and battlemented 
portal, of a red ochre, is flanked by a substantial 
guard-house on either side, and under the arch, 
framed by the shadowed ceiling of the vaulted 
tunnel, there is as pretty a glimpse as could be 
wished of the long pale stretch of desert, studded 
here and there with clean-cut block-houses, square 
and white, and arched over with the white glare of 
the sky just tinged with blue where the line of 
the keystone cuts it. Under it, quivering in the 
mirage that thrums like a violin string over the 
surface of the desert from dawn to sunset, stretches 
the waste to the purple of the horizon. 

The railway now runs up to Bikanir. You can 
to-day take train from Merta Road, somewhere 
between Jaipur and Jodhpur. But within this year 
they have had to dig out the railway lines three 
times already from the drifts of sand that are 
always accumulating in even the shallowest of 

15 



226 UNDER THE SUN. 

cuttings, and a railway engineer of Bikanir told 
me that the expense would probably prove too 
great. It is curious that, though these steel rails 
may have to be abandoned, though Bikanir, which 
has enjoyed this momentary contact with the 
civilised world, may again be shut off from all 
human communication, except that of camels and 
carts, such as it knew in the days of Shahjehan, yet 
the railway, for all its neglect, will remain ready 
for disinterment by any large-souled Maharaja 
in time to come. For nothing rusts in Bikanir. 
There is not one speck of rust upon any one sword 
blade or ring of chain armour in all the armouries 
of the city. The mail that was worn last year when 
the Prince of Wales visited Bikanir was two hun- 
dred years old, and had, indeed, needed nothing 
save a repair to a broken link from that day to this. 
In the Maharaja's own collection there are some 
fine Andrea Ferrara blades, and it is safe to assert 
that not one specimen of the great smith's work 
exists in Europe to-day in anything like the un- 
tarnished and perfect condition of those in this 
remote collection. 

There is a strange prejudice here which is so often 
found at Rajputana. The Maharaja, by tradition 
and by preference, has built hjmself a new palace, 




Gossips in Bikanir. 




Diawing water : Bikanir. 



{^Facing page 226. 



BIKANIR. 227 

In old days, a new chief contented himself with 
adding a few rooms for his own personal use to the 
great palace of his ancestors in the town. The 
present ruler has elected to build himself an entirely 
new residence, a mile outside the walls. This, 
in a way, affords a more striking contrast than 
anything else in Bikanir. If Jaipur is the town 
that Solomon transplanted, this house is nothing 
less than the palace which Aladdin's wicked uncle 
deported into the desert by a rub of the lamp — 
the same palace which Aladdin had at a similar 
insignificant outlay of trouble built for his bride 
in a single night. This, believe me, is the very 
palace. The story that Aladdin moved it back 
again must be untrue. They say here that it was 
built from the designs of Sir Swinton Jacob, but 
everyone will agree with my version who has once 
seen the rose-coloured walls, terraces, cupolas, and 
infinitely fine fretted windows of this palace, rising, 
without an interposition of even so much grass or 
herbage as a Brixton villa can boast of, straight 
out of the gaunt emptiness and still moving sand 
of the Great Indian Desert. 

It would be hard to find a greater contrast or 
incongruity than that one experiences in leaving 
the rooms of this palace luxuriously furnished with 

15* 



228 UNDER THE SUN. 

every European invention^ equipped with the 
latest comforts of the West, served by telephones 
innumerable and lighted throughout by electricity 
— and then finding one's self obliged to allow 
full room for the passage of a carriage drawn 
by two elephants along the high road leading to 
the town, escorted by men in full chain armour 
upon camels as well drilled as any cavalry horse in 
Europe. Camels are, indeed, the best-known pro- 
duction of Bikanir. They are the finest of the 
Indian breed, and the Maharaja has, by careful 
selection, produced a class which, in its way, is as 
remarkable as that of the horses of Jodhpur. You 
will never do much with your camel in the way 
of beauty. There is an old story that when God, 
in the Garden of Eden, had finished making the 
animals, and had sent them up to Adam to be 
named, our first father, moved by a generous spirit 
of emulation, asked whether he might be allowed to 
make an animal too. I do not know what opinion 
the reader may have upon the strange question 
raised by Sir Oliver Lodge as to whether the con- 
ception of a deity excludes any such attribute as a 
sense of humour. But I like to think of a quiet 
smile upon Jehovah's face as he gave Adam per- 
mission to attempt the job. For some days Adam 



BIKANIR. 229 

wrestled with the problem, and finally led up for 
the approval of his Creator the first of the breed 
of camels. I like to feel that there was laughter 
in the courts of Heaven that morning. But re- 
pulsively ugly as a camel is, with eyes and eye- 
lashes that remind one of the Jabbawock, with 
supercilious and flapping lips, with methods of 
fighting and expostulation that are impossibly un- 
graceful, and with housemaid's knee in patches all 
over his body, there is still much to be said for this 
ungainly beast. 

The Maharaja's palace is a vast structure of 
white walls and arcaded galleries. Tourists are 
invited to admire certain rooms, the walls of which 
are ornamented with pieces of broken willow- 
pattern plate. The tale that one Maharaja broke 
up into small pieces his priceless blue china for this 
purpose is luckily untrue. Upon examination, 
most of these pieces of crockery betray an un- 
mistakable European and even a mechanical 
colour-printing origin. The finest things in the 
palace are the armoury with the specimens of cut 
steel, which are perhaps without parallel in India, 
and the gesso ornamentation of the halls of audience 
and the library. The latter contains one Persian 
manuscript of the Leilet-wa-Mejnoon, of which the 



230 UNDER THE SUN. 

illumination is very remarkable. There is an 
ornamented circle at the beginning of the manu- 
script, which for minute and intricate detail is only- 
surpassed by the Irish school of miniaturists of 
the seventh century. There is little else in the 
halls which repays careful inspection. The town 
of Bikanir is always interesting. Upon the walls 
of the more important houses there are painted 
spirited and warlike frescoes, in a manner which 
instantly recalls the Bayeux tapestry ; and the 
Cloth Market Street, where one may buy saris of 
yellow and orange, and cadmium, and a score of 
other tints, is one that will attract a visitor day 
after day. At the jail, you may buy carpets of 
excellent manufacture and curious leather bottles 
made of camel skin much over-decorated with blue 
and red and gold. 

But the charm of Bikanir lies rather in its unique 
and clear air than in anything else. It may be 
that in a few months it will be a difficult thing to 
make a journey to the desert city, but so long as 
the railway remains in working order it will be a 
pity not to make this easy expedition from more 
favoured spots of India. There is but one place 
in India that is more removed from the greenery 
one associates with civilisation, and that is Jaisul- 




A street in Bikanir. 



[J^aa'ft^ page 230. 



BIKANIR. 231 

mir, where there is Uttle that can repay a visitor. 
From Bikanir the railway hnes run on north to 
Lahore, and should one tire of the tedious journey 
that must be made, the curious atmosphere and 
even more curious life of this community of the 
wilderness, it is an easy thing to escape to the 
capital of the Punjab and enjoy again the hotels 
and gardens and lawns of Anglo-India. 



232 



Benares. 



They brought her down not unkindly to the 
burning-ghat. Her Httle almost childlike body 
was given over duly to the headman. For over 
an hour he has been ready for her, and without 
more ceremony than a sprinkling of Ganges water 
and the placing of a few grains of rice inside 
the lips, all that is left of poor little Yaradhani is 
laid out upon the pile of logs that is to be her 
funeral pyre. Her relations had brought her down 
wrapped in a cloth which they were evidently 
loath to lose. With almost brutal rapidity the 
woman possessed herself of the cloth, leaving the 
tiny limp brown body naked on the logs. She 
and her companion then shuffled off and Yarad- 
hani was left to make her last great journey alone. 
After all, she had not been treated so badly. 
There had even been a few months of real happiness 
in that little nineteen-year-long life. Of course, she 
knew that the end might come at any time after 



BENARES. 233 

her husband found that she was not going to present 
him with a child, but he was not unkindly, and 
things had gone well until the other woman came. 
From that moment the girl knew that her days 
were numbered. After all, she did not think it was 
unfair. A man must have a son and heir to help 
him across the fiery gap which divides this world 
from the next, and if one woman could not give 
him one, why it was not unreasonable that he 
should replace her by another. I wonder whether 
the Western mind has ever understood, or will 
ever understand, how entirely reasonable, from 
an Oriental point of view, Sarah's action was in 
giving her Egyptian handmaid to Abraham. We 
in Europe have gone so far beyond that primi- 
tive conception of the first duty of a woman that 
there are probably few Europeans who would not 
be scandalised at the moral standard which per- 
mitted and even lauded the substitution of Hagar 
for Sarah, and it is therefore useless to explain or 
expect understanding. If one may believe all one 
hears, the tendency now shown is in a quite opposite 
direction. But civilised persons in the West must 
take it for granted that such an action as Abraham's 
is to this day regarded as natural in every corner 
of India. Yaradhani, poor soul, did not grumble 



234 UNDER THE SUN. 

against fate, and lying there nestled upon the rough 
logs of her last bed one could almost catch a sigh 
of contentment, and even of pride, that her hus- 
band had kept his word, and that, though he had 
found no use for her on earth, he had really sent 
her to be burned beside the mother of all rivers in 
the most sacred of all holy precincts. She had 
exacted the promise from him in some tender mood 
many years ago, soon, indeed, after her mother 
had sent her over for the first time to the house of 
the fourteen-year-old husband, to whom she had 
even then been married seven years. Yaradhani 
lying there in the burning-ghat, her life's dream 
accomplished, little knew how strenuously her 
husband had tried to evade the fulfilment of his 
promise. It was an expensive business. You 
could not get even that frail little body transported 
two hundred miles without some cost, and if it 
had not been that the village Brahmin, to whom 
Yaradhani had once told of the promise with pride 
and almost with joy, had insisted, for his own 
profit, upon the fulfilment of the vow, it is possible 
that Yaradhani might after all have been cheaply 
burned at the nearest cemetery. As it was, to save 
expense, she had been taken to Benares before the 
end came. As to that end-coming there was not. 



BENARES. 235 

however, to be any doubt, and the two women 
who accompanied the body to the burning-ghat 
understood their orders. 

All this seems cold-hearted and horrible to a 

generation which has forgotten, perhaps, many 

brutal things in the past history of England, but 

one thing may be said. It is possible that the 

permanence of a race is in almost direct ratio to the 

small value it sets upon the life of the individual, 

and there can be little doubt that nowadays we 

are in danger of losing much through the exaggerated 

estimate which it is the modern tendency to place 

upon the value of the individual's life. However, 

this is no place to preach a sermon on the text 

provided by little Yaradhani as she lies contentedly 

on her pyre waiting the application of the sacred 

torch. Three yards away the sacred water of 

the filthy Ganges heaved within a light boom of 

bamboo. It was mud-stained and a heavy coat 

of black wood ash stagnated upon it, marked here 

and there with marigolds and red powder. The 

headman lays two or three more logs slantmg 

across her, and then with a shrug of his shoulders 

tells his small seven-year-old son to light the mass 

of wood shavings on which the pyre has been 

built up. For his own part, he was due elsewhere 



236 UNDER THE SUN. 

across the ghat. A far more important personage 
than Yaradhani awaited his attention. It was 
the late Prime Minister of a great Maharaja in 
the plains. Even now the body of the great man 
was being ceremonially borne down the steps with 
the women muffled from head to foot in white, 
wailing continually, and the dead man's son ready 
to set with his own hand the fire to his father's 
body. There was much money to be gained here, 
and no more time could be wasted over a mere 
woman. So his little son, squatting on his hams, 
was left to poke the burning torch into the pyre. 
There was an instant response, and a great flame 
licked upwards through the logs. The pyre was 
well alight, and at the first touch of the kindly 
flame Yaradhani seemed to snuggle down almost 
with relief among the splinters of the wood for 
which she had longed. 

That is Benares. They do many other things 
in this great and religious centre. They make 
atrocious brasswork ; they weave the most beau- 
tiful kinkhabs in the world. Benares sword- 
blades are known all through the Ganges Valley, 
and the political agitations which sometimes 
demand the attention of Calcutta find in Benares 
also a congenial home. But Benares' real life and 



BENARES. 237 

significance is religious alone. The worship of Siva, 
the subtlest, and in some ways the most advanced, 
of all conceptions of a deity, is centred eternally in 
this strange and unwholesome town. It is curious 
to think that to the strange little mind of Yarad- 
hani some of the more advanced conceptions of 
scientific theology had been as simple as they are 
as 5^et unintelligible to the ordinary European mind. 
There are very few travellers in India who can 
claim that they understand the attributes of this 
member of the Trinity. He is the god of death ; 
he is the god, also, of reproduction and of life. 
There is no question more frequently asked by 
any European visitor to India who takes what is 
called an intelligent interest in the religion of the 
country than the clue to the reasoning which has 
given to one and the same member of the Trinity 
such apparently contradictory spheres of action. 
Brahma is the Creator,* Vishnu is the Preserver. 
Why, then, should both death and reproduction 
be the joint and inconsistent cares of Siva ? Not 
one in a hundred visitors to the country, unless 
their imagination has been quickened by reading 

* In all India there is but one temple — beside Pushkar lake- to Brahma. As 
a curiosity I have given a photograph of it. Two reasons are given by Hindus, 
but the really remarkable thing is its parallel in Christianity. No church is 
dedicated to the first person of our Trinity either. 



238 UNDER THE SUN. 

Chevrillon's book, or some other of the few volumes 
which help to make Indian life a living thing, ever 
takes the trouble to reconstruct to himself, so far 
as he may, the true attitude of a native towards 
his religion. Yet Yaradhani herself, as an article 
of her creed, had long understood the scientific 
truth that without struggle and death life cannot 
be. Siva is the foreword of all that truth which 
Darwin published, and the doctrine of the survival 
of the fittest can hardly be symbolised better than 
by the trident which is Siva's own particular 
emblem. 

Yet in its Indian home what a foul religion this 
is. Benares itself fitly symbolises the great faith 
which finds itself centred there. Dark and damp 
and narrow are her entries and her streets foul- 
smelling with hot and luscious stenches. The 
marigold, the fit symbol of lust, flares in daisy 
chains along her every street, and in the hot and 
stagnant courts both air and sun are shut off by the 
dense foliage overhead of her matted pipals. You 
will find sleek bulls, good-natured pirates of the 
fruit and confectionery stalls, living emblems of 
virility, rambling loose in her narrowest streets, and 
the crash of cymbals and the monotone of drums 
make hideous discord from behind walls into which 




The greatest Temple to Siva : the Golden Temple, Benares. 




The largest Temple in India : a view of the forbidden sanctuary of Vishnu's 
Temple, Srirangam, 

[Faciii^rpai;c 238. 



BENARES. 239 

the wholesome Ught of day has never penetrated. 
No centre of Indian Hfe has been less affected by our 
presence than Benares. The European quarter 
lies two miles away near the railway station, and 
most visitors know little more of this labyrinth of 
dirty and foetid passages and stairs and courts and 
tunnels, which, like a human warren, undermines 
the mass of buildings on the river-bank, than can 
be seen from the platform of a river-boat or a hasty 
plunge into the slums which encircle the Golden 
Temple. Yet if you would understand the life 
of India this is the place where, and where only, 
it can be learned. 

The burning-ghats down by the river are the 
most important of all. Here beside the flood 
which washes away all sin the black mire of wood- 
ash stains and scums the water yards out from the 
shore. The place is stagnant and dirty. There is 
here no pretension at ornamentation, or even of 
dignity. The men who officiate are of a low caste, 
yet without their touch the holiest Brahmin cannot 
to the full reap the priceless privilege of Benares. 
There is squalor in every corner of the bank. 
Heaps of decaying flowers carelessly raked aside 
give out a pestilent odour, for which, however, one 
is almost thankful in that it §on\ewh,at masks the 



240 UNDER THE SUN. 

even more terrible smell that hangs always in the 
air. Wailing and lamentation are the only sounds 
that mingle with the crackle of the flames or the 
occasional report and fierce hiss of some expiring 
log of wood. There are perhaps four or five idle 
sightseers squatting along a projecting parapet, 
but their interest is of the most casual description. 
You will find it at first a hard thing to understand 
the real and awful sanctity of this littered and 
neglected spot. Yet here is the centre of Hin- 
duism. The ground is as holy as the water which 
laps up against it, and the fortunate man or woman 
whose body is burnt with due ceremony here knows 
— as surely as the Mussulman knows it who dies in 
battle against the heretic, as surely as the Buddhist 
knows it who falls fainting upon the Ling-Khor at 
Lhasa, as surely as the Catholic who dies after 
plenary absolution by the Church knows it — that 
eternal happiness is reserved for him beyond all 
doubt and hesitation, whatever their sin or negli- 
gence on earth. Sivaism is the centre round which 
all Hinduism revolves, and you will learn more by 
seeking to understand the significance to a Hindu 
of this grim cremation ground than by loitering 
for months among the most famous temples and 
shrines of India. 




The Lion Pillar recently found at Sarnath, near Bei: 



[Facing page 240. 



241 



Buddh-Gaya. 



Seven miles south of Gaya lies that one spot which, 
if votes could decide the matter, is out of all 
question the holiest of all holies, the most sacred 
rood of ground upon the surface of the earth. For 
the Buddhists of Asia this is their Gethsemane, 
Bethlehem and their Calvary ; this is their Mecca 
and their Medina. For this is no other place than 
that wherein the most Blessed Master received en- 
lightenment and the knowledge that at last upon 
him had fallen that divinity which ten thousand 
years before had vanished from the earth. One may 
tread the same road by the side of the River Phalgu 
as that which Prince Gautama trod fainting, dis- 
heartened and discredited. We may be sure, too, 
that the landscape is much the same as that which 
greeted his eyes also. Then, as now, the patient 
yokes of oxen turned at the end of their furrow 
in the hot earth which needs but the three-inch 

scratching of a primitive plough. Then, as now, 

i6 



242 UNDER THE SUN. 

the dipping poles of the wells worked in unison, 
scattered in couples and threes over the land- 
scape ; and then, as now, the mynas chattered 
and flirted white wings in the hot roadside dust. 
Twenty-four centuries have made less change along 
this country road than twenty-four months in the 
outskirts of one of the larger towns of India to-day. 
The wide level sands of the Phalgu, with hardly a 
trickle of water, seeking a shelter against the eastern 
bank, are revealed and hidden now and again as 
we jolt along the road to Buddh-Gaya. If you are 
looking you may see somewhere along the dusty 
road a flash of salmon-pink that will betray 
the presence of one of the chelas or disciples of the 
Hindu owner of the land on which Buddh-Gaya 
stands. 

The last mile of the journey is particularly 
beautiful. The road passes over a tiny nek between 
two grassy folds, and a pinnacle of golden brown 
overtops the shisham and banyan trees. A few 
straggling houses appear through the trees on 
either side of the road a quarter of a mile ahead. 
Those on the left are the farthest outposts of the 
Mahant's own house. This worthy of&cial, of a 
shrewd but not unpleasant type, is well content to 
combine the collection of alms from devout pil- 



BUDDH-GAYA. 243 

grims of every creed with the reputation and 
sanctity which involves the person of the Keeper 
of the Shrine. The fact that the shrine of which 
he is the guardian has no original connection what- 
ever with his own faith is a matter of small moment 
to him. It is his property, and he has done wise 
in hedging about his anomalous position with all 
the ceremony that he can. His ancestors were 
of the same opinion, and the present Mahant has 
in his possession a curious document, which oddly 
emphasises the strangeness of his position, for he, 
a Hindu, bases his claim to the guardianship of a 
Buddhist shrine, now under the control of a Chris- 
tian Government, upon a grant made to his ancestor 
by a Mohammedan emperor. 

One turns sharply up a little hill to the right, and 
at the top one looks down into a wooded amphi- 
theatre enclosed on every side by a low wall with a 
gate in the middle. In the centre of this natural 
basin rises the temple of Buddh-Gaya. Externally 
it consists now of a highly-decorated plinth about 
twenty feet high, from which again springs the 
central spire, over one hundred and fifty feet in 
height, rising in stages like a South Indian temple, 
each course set about with plaques and fluted 

pillars in set panels and grotesques. At each of 

16* 



244 UNDER THE SUK 

the four corners of the pHnth is a pyramid-crowned 
cell perhaps eight feet square externally. The 
construction of Buddh-Gaya temple is interesting 
because it represents, and in Northern India is 
almost alone in representing, the old Indian form 
of the vihara or Buddhist monastery. There are 
two storeys, and though it is thought that Buddh- 
Gaya was never actually used for that purpose, in 
arrangement it symbolises the primitive distribu- 
tion of the rooms used as dormitories for the monks, 
set about and over the central chamber of worship 
which contained the great image of Buddah, just as 
may be found in Tibet to this day. This con- 
struction may be well seen from the upper edge of 
the hollow. 

We look down into the wide, tree-covered bowl, 
in the centre of which is the temple. It is cum- 
bered about on all sides with an infinite number of 
small shrines, dagobas and stupas, set up at one 
date or another by the pious, but now for the most 
part mutilated or in fragments. The usual entrance 
is by the steps descending from the northern edge 
of the amphitheatre. To the right at the bottom 
is a wide concreted floor overhung by a large pipal. 
This is the traditional place of worship for the 
Hindu pilgrims to the shrine. Until the visit of 




Buddh-Gaya. 




Asoka's Railing, Buddh-Gaya. 



\_Faciiig page 244. 



BUDDH-GAYA. 245 

the Tashi Lama last December no Hindu service 
took place under the other sacred tree — that within 
the temple enclosure. This is a point which may 
be of importance in the future. The tree first 
mentioned, that which is identified with Hindu 
ritual, grows entirely outside the sacred limits of 
the Buddhist shrine, as indicated by the still 
remaining fragments of a great red sandstone 
railing. 

Passing on to the temple itself, one enters it 
with increasing reverence and expectation, only 
to see the name of a certain worthy Lieutenant- 
Governor of Bengal conspicuously advertised in 
company with those of the architects who were 
responsible for the restoration of Buddh-Gaya 
thirty years ago. This desecration, for it is hardly 
less, is one of the things which the better taste 
of modern days will surely rectify. No one who 
knows what sound work was done by Sir Ashley Eden 
in all parts of his province will do other than regret 
that it should be his name which thus vulgarly 
obtrudes itself upon the gaze of the Buddhist who, 
after many months of travel, finds himself at last, 
though it may be only as a stranger and an outcast, 
upon the threshold of the Holiest of all Holies. 
Inside the middle of the temple is a square un- 



246 UNDER THE SUN. 

lighted chamber about fifteen feet by twenty. 
Upon an altar facing the door is raised a great 
image of Buddha. It is true that the Hindus 
have desecrated the august countenance with the 
tilak or sect-mark of Vishnu, but the significance 
of the place remains unmarred.* There in the 
very spot where the Buddha sits upon the 
altar — set up, perhaps, within the Master's life- 
time to mark it beyond all possibility of doubt or 
argument — there, two thousand four hundred years 
ago, Prince Gautama, beneath the leaves of the 
famous pipal, wrestled his last with the lusts of the 
world, the temptations of the flesh and the wiles 
of the devil ; and there he received in humility and 
awe the annunciation that God was now born 
again in this world and in his own person. The 
most bigoted of Christian missionaries cannot but 
feel a thrill in looking upon the birthplace of a 
religion which has set upon a better Way more 
souls than can be boasted by any other faith on 
earth, and which in no small measure paved the 
way in Syria for that Christian faith which owes 



* That the Hindus have painted the marks of Vishnu on Buddha, and, worse 
still, have set up so close to the " Diamond Throne " a great stone lingam, 
seems an infeult intolerable to be borne. It is not to the credit of our boasted 
religious toleration that we should have allowed this obscene insult to be 
inflicted by one set of our Indian subjects upon another. 



BUDDH-GAYA. 247 

as many of its highest teachings to it as to its other 
great forerunner, the Mosaic Law. 

Here, beyond all dispute, here exactly and here 
eternally, so long as the world lasts, is known and 
marked the exact spot where this great faith began. 
When Prince Gautama knew his divinity he rose 
from under the tree, and, taking eight steps to 
the north, he walked backwards and forwards 
eighteen paces to the east and to the west. If 
you will go outside the temple you will find a long 
low stonework about three feet high, upon which 
are still preserved nineteen stone lotuses, set there 
in primitive days to mark the spots at which flowers 
sprang up beneath the Master's feet. Going on 
a few yards further you will turn the corner of 
the temple to the left and stand beneath the Bo- 
tree. This is beyond question the lineal descendant 
of the tree beneath whose branches Buddha sat.* 
It grows eight feet from the centre of the western 
wall and its branches brush up against the stained 
plaster and brick of the plinth of the temple. Be- 
neath it there is on the one side another old altar 
built up against the wall, and, on the other, actually 



* In the Museum in Calcutta there are preserved several considerable frag- 
ments of the dead roots found ttndemeath the original " Diamond Throne," 
roots which must be those of tJie sacred tree itself. 



248 UNDER THE SUN. 

supporting one of its biggest boughs, is an old stone 
doorway buttressed by a casing of modern bricks. 
A low wall of plastered brick encloses on three sides a 
little area in which these relics stand, and outside 
this httJe enclosure again is a clear space, which 
runs also all round the temple, and was used for 
the frequent circumambulations necessary in the 
ritual of the Buddhist faith. This clear space is of 
especial hohness, and was once shut off by the 
stone railing which the Emperor Asoka set up 
about the year 240 B.C. The original temple built 
by Asoka was very different from that which we 
see to-day. As far as it can be reconstructed now, 
it seems to have consisted of a high wall enclosing 
a space, of which the greatest dimensions were 
from north to south. In the middle of this a 
pillared stone temple rose, and, in the centre of it, 
the "Diamond Throne," somewhat entangled with 
the branches of the Bo-tree towards the west. This, 
with the exception of the nineteen lotus foot-marks, 
is perhaps the only part of the temple that has re- 
mained in its exact original site from the earliest 
days to these. Most of the information which we 
possess as to the original shape of the shrine set up 
to protect this holy spot is derived from the carvings 
upon the railing at Bharhut. There is no question 



BUDDH-GAYA. 249 

that these are intended to represent the shrine at 
Buddh-Gaya^ and, crude as they are, they present 
adequate evidence of the original appearance of the 
temple. 

But the real intention of this chapter is not so 
much to describe the archaeological interests of 
Buddh-Gaya as to tell the story of the greatest 
pilgrim of all who ever made the journey and 
worshipped there. Only three white persons were 
present on the day on which the Tashi Lama made 
his formal obeisance before the spot on which, by 
the unswerving belief of Northern Buddhism, he 
himself, Buddha, and no other, had received en- 
lightenment more than two thousand years ago. It 
is difficult for a Western European to put himself in 
a position wholly to understand the importance of 
this visit. Buddha, that is to say, that divine 
spirit which returned to earth in the person of 
the Great Teacher, is reincarnated in a greater or 
less degree in several of the great members of the 
Tibetan Hierarchy, but the Most Precious Teacher, 
His Holiness the Grand Lama of Tashi-lhunpo, 
is regarded by the Northern Buddhists not merely 
as the Vicegerent upon earth of the divinity, the 
only position that his nearest parallel, the Pope, 
may claim, but actually as the prolongation in this 



250 UNDER THE SUN. 

world of the spirit and essence of Buddha himself. 
That is to say, for the little crowd of red or yellow 
garmented men who sat beneath the B6-tree 
at Buddh-Gaya on the twenty-second of December, 
1905, the occasion was no less than that of Buddha 
himself revisiting the scene of his trial and his 
triumph, after its abandonment and desecration 
for many centuries. To this soul-stirring situa- 
tion there can hardly be a parallel in Christianity or 
in Islam. I had the luck to be one of the three 
Englishmen who witnessed it. 

About eleven o'clock, His Holiness, a quiet 
and refined-looking man, with one of the pleasantest 
smiles I have ever seen in my life, entered his state 
palanquin and was borne through the little village 
to the gate in the eastern wall of the sacred en- 
closure. The path from here to the main gate of 
the temple, which immediately faces it, is some- 
what cumbered up with pillars and torii, and at 
that moment was still further littered with some 
of the posts of the Asokan railing, which the Mahant 
or his predecessors had taken away as building stone, 
and which have only just been restored. The 
palanquin was set down outside the temple door, 
and the Grand Lama stepped out of it. Moving 
steadily and with a natural grace, which comes 




The Great Buddha on the Diamond Throne Buddh-Gaya. 



{^Facing page 250. 



BUDDH-GAYA. 251 

easily, perhaps, to one who has from his infancy 
received as a matter of unquestioned right the 
worship men pay to gods, he walked up over the 
rice and flower-strewn floor into the outer chamber 
and stood for a moment at the entrance of the 
inner shrine. The sight was one that it is im- 
possible fully to describe. For the nonce the 
inner room, with its great Buddha seated upon the 
throne, had been transformed into a Tibetan sanc- 
tuary. Upon the Diamond Throne flared and 
smoked a hundred httle butter-lamps of brass. 
Great katags swathed the shoulders of the idol, 
almost covering the permanent cloak and the 
official robes with which the Mahant had decked it 
for the day. (At the same time he had almost 
entirely destroyed its beauty by regilding and 
repainting the face : so far as he could help it, there 
was little left of the great peace which marks the 
countenance of Buddha from Mukden to Ceylon, 
and the mark of Vishnu had been repainted with 
malicious distinction upon the forehead.) On 
either side of the little chamber two rows 
of squatting monks muttered a monotone of 
prayer. A little to the right of the doorway the 
figure of the Crown Prince of Sikkim alternately 
raised itself to a kneeling position and then again 



252 UNDER THE SUN. 

resumed the motionless and prone attitude in which 
alone he dared contemplate the holiness of the 
place and of the occasion. On either side of the 
Grand Lama, as he paused for a moment at the 
threshold, was a Tibetan monk of high rank. One 
was the sagacious-looking face of His Holiness' s 
prime minister ; on the other side — and it was 
towards him that at this supreme moment of his 
life the Grand Lama leaned — was the friend of his 
childhood and of his manhood, his old and beloved 
tutor. The Lama himself was dressed with perfect 
taste, not in his golden robes of incarnate divinity, 
but in the plain dark crimson frock of a common 
monk. His lips moved automatically ; and then 
he stepped forward, and, before taking his seat 
upon a cushion, he bowed once slowly and as 
an equal before the great image of Prince 
Gautama, letting his forehead sink down and 
touch the edge of the Diamond Throne. He 
then retired and assisted pontifically at the service 
which continued before, during and after his arrival 
without apparent reference to himself. The door- 
way and the outer chamber were thronged with 
jostling pilgrims. The larger part were, of course, 
Tibetans, who had come down in the suite of the 
Grand Lama, but there were representatives also 



BUDDH-GAYA. 253 

from Burma, Ceylon, Siam, Nepal, and even Japan. 
The heavy coils of blue incense smoke mixed with 
the brown reek of the smoking butter-lamps and 
drifted out through the high doorways into the 
sunny spaces of the outer air. The drone of many 
smothered repetitions made a volume of incom- 
prehensible sound, which was mastered now and 
again by the louder monotone, rising and falling 
again across the open door, of the Buddhist monks, 
who had from the earliest dawn been wandering 
round and round the temple, always in the same 
direction as the hands of a clock, clicking the beads 
of their rosaries and murmuring the everlasting 
anthem " Om mani peme hum." 

An hour later the Grand Lama, dressed in his 
full splendour of gold silk brocade, came from 
inside the temple and took up his seat upon the 
outer throne to the west beneath the branches of 
the Bo-tree itself. Here the Buddhist mass was 
sung. Tibetans are very jealous of the presence of 
strangers at this particular service. I therefore 
had asked Captain O'Connor to sound the Grand 
Lama as to whether he would object to my making 
a sketch of the incident. Permission was at once 
and willingly given, and in the coloured plate which 
forms the frontispiece to this book there is at least 



254 UNDER THE SUN. 

this interest, that, whatever its artistic demerits, 
it represents one of the most absorbing incidents of 
rehgious history that have ever taken place. Even 
the most bigoted opponent of what a misinformed 
West calls idolatry will admit the unique situation 
in which, if the description will be pardoned by 
theoretic Buddhists, the god of a religion returns 
for the first time after many centuries to revisit 
the scene of his incarnation, his trial, and his 
victory. The leaves of the Bo-tree rustle lightly 
in the warm breeze, and little dots of sunlight 
filter down upon the gold and crimson of the 
kneeling monks. There is the distant cry of a 
child herding buffaloes back from the river to the 
village. 

In an hour's time the mass was over. The 
water and the rice had been distributed and 
the last benediction said. Then came the 
ceremonial reception of the pious by the 
Grand Lama, and with the rest His Holiness re- 
ceived ourselves. There was the exchange of a 
katag, a moment's pressure of the hand and a 
kindly word or two in Tibetan, which, alas ! only 
Captain O'Connor could understand. Chairs were 
given us on the Grand Lama's right hand, and we 
watched the ceremony and the varying salutations 




Under the Bo-tree, Buddh-Gaya. 



[Facing page 254. 



BUDDH-GAYA. 255 

accorded each pilgrim with much interest. The 
kindHest of all, an actual touching of the brow with 
his own, was given to the old tutor. Tea was then 
given us. Tibetan tea, as all the world knows, is 
mixed with butter and salt, and becomes rather a 
thin greasy soup than anything which is known 
to Europe. The Grand Lama (bless his kindly 
heart) had heard that we barbarians drank tea 
with sugar, and with the best of intentions he had 
prepared a special brew for us, in which, on the 
top of the salt and butter, he had added handfuls 
of sugar. Even O'Connor, who is more or less 
used to Tibetan drinks, quailed before this awful 
beverage. There was another kindly salutation, 
and the Grand Lama was borne back to his home, 
while the great majority of the monks resumed their 
circumambulations, muttering absently the while. 

All day long it went on. There is no such 
holy place in all the universe as that which is sur- 
rounded by the rails of Buddh-Gaya, and the 
merit which a man may acquire by walking round 
and round is greater than that which he may lay 
up for himself anywhere else on earth. There is a 
sacred road at Lhasa, round which thousands of 
pilgrims annually move, within the loop of which 
even the infidel and the stranger may, in dying. 



256 UNDER THE SUN. 

reach to Nirvana. There is the even hoher tract 
that surrounds the cathedral at Lhasa, and the 
present writer had once no inconsiderable chance 
of discovering by personal experience whether a 
mere Christian actually departing this life on that 
street would, or would not, go straight to Nirvana 
as Lamaism assures the world. But this is more 
sacred than either. Far into the night the hum 
of pilgrims' voices came up through the darkened 
trees, and by the red tossing light of a thousand 
high-flaring lamps ranged upon every crevice and 
sill of the exterior of the temple, one might still 
see the patient Buddhists celebrating this most 
holy opportunity by the performance of the cir- 
cumambulation by repeated prostrations. This 
most effective act of worship entails the lying 
down of the pilgrim at full length upon the ground. 
He stretches out his arms and makes a slight mark 
in the dust. A prayer is then said, and the pilgrim 
rises and sets his feet upon the mark he has made. 
After another prayer he again stretches himself out 
full length upon the ground, making another mark 
with his outstretched fingers. This process is 
repeated until he has arrived at the place from 
which he started. It was a strange thing to go 
down among the scented flowers and occasional 



BUDDH-GAYA. 257 

wafts of incense in the dark night to see the weird 
worship of these human '' loopers " in the fitful light 
of the wasting illuminations, and it made a fitting 
termination to one of the most interesting days I 
have ever spent in my life. 



17 



258 



South India. 



There is something about Southern India in 
general which marks it off very distinctly from the 
India that is usually known to the touring visitor. 
Its remoteness from the great centres of Moham- 
medan religion, and, therefore, its freedom from 
the influences of Islam, its very luxuriant vegeta- 
tion, and, therewith, of course, its warmer climate — 
all these have conspired to make the characteristics 
of the Deccan and the Carnatic very different from 
those which strike the eye so clearly in the north. 
Here is that India which is traditionally known to 
Western nations. Much that mediaeval travellers 
have written about the India that they knew is, 
in these days, true only of Travancore and Cochin. 
Here in the south there is no busy and commercial 
competition ; here the chattering and seditious 
Bengalis never penetrate. It is a lotus-eating land, 
where superstition flourishes and caste binds down 
its votaries with an iron hand. Here the more 




The old Dutch Fort, Quilon. 



\_Fadng pao-e 258. 



SOUTH INDIA. 259 

venturesome traveller among the backwaters of 
the west, or a sportsman from Quilon, that green 
gem of tropical India, pursuing his quarry far 
into the ravines of the Ghats, will still find the 
simple Hfe that was known to Vasco Da Gama and 
Sir Thomas Roe. Here he will find villages where 
human sacrifice has but recently been aboHshed. 
Stranger still, he will find out-caste tribes of Santals 
who will die of hunger rather than accept food 
from the hands of Brahmins ! Still on the Nilgiris 
there await him the thatched huts with finials of 
stone where a dead girl is married to any chance 
passer-by in order that she may escape the awful 
punishment that awaits the spinster in the next 
world. Still he may find the ordeal by fire carried 
out, or, at least, some old resident who will tell 
him, truly enough, that he has seen with his own eye 
the Sanyasi walk confidently across the red-hot 
bars of iron. Nay, in Madras itself you will find at 
His Excellency's evening parties that the relative 
aristocracy of the native girls is in inverse ratio to 
the length of their skirts— in a word, you will still 
find nearly all that in your childhood made stories 
of India so fearsome and so fascinating. 

If this is true of the ordinary hfe of the Carnatic, 
it is true in a very special manner of the great 

17* 



26o UNDER THE SUN. 

South Indian temples. Up in the north of India 
the European, if the truth must be told, is little 
anxious to penetrate into, or stay long within, 
even the most famous of Hindoo or Sikh temples. 
Twenty minutes exhaust for some people the 
inside even of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, 
and though he is indignantly repelled from its 
namesake at Benares, no traveller really believes 
that inside that crowded-upon and insignificant 
building there is much to be seen of interest. It is 
far different in the south. Already, at Puri, one 
would give an ear to get inside, and once south of 
the Kistna, nothing proves so finally and irrefutably 
the gulf that exists between east and west as two 
or three hours spent in such a building as the Great 
Temple of Madura. 

It is difhcult to take one of these temples as being 
entirely typical of the rest. Each presents over- 
poweringly distinct features, though in certain re- 
spects there is no doubt a similarity of sentiment 
and architecture. The whole plan of these great 
and sacred shrines has been framed with a view 
to increase in every possible way the solemnity 
of the innermost sanctuary. At Srirangam there 
are no fewer than seven square enclosing walls, 
each of which contains between itself and the 




The Main Gateway, Tanjore. 



\^Facii!g page 260. 



SOUTH INDIA. 261 

next a human warren of temple servitors. The 
outer wall of this " nest " of concentric squares, 
if the phrase may be permitted, is 3,072 feet in 
length and 2,521 feet in width, 20 feet 8 inches in 
height and 6 feet wide at the top. Now it is difficult 
to appreciate the real meaning of these figures. 
They can perhaps best be understood by reference 
to a map of London. One side of the temple wall 
would reach from the statue of Wellington outside 
the Royal Exchange to beyond that of Queen Anne 
outside the west front of St. Paul's Cathedral, 
while the side at right angles from the Royal Ex- 
change would just reach across the river to the 
southern approach to London Bridge. In area 
this one temple is thus equivalent to about one- 
fourth of the City. 

Tanjore is magnificent ; half-fort, half temple, 
it stands secure without the city. Hampi's huge 
pyramid-spire mourns yet the desolation among 
the ruins beneath the banyans of the river bank. 
Madura is a city in itself mysteriously pent up 
within its high red walls and heaven-piercing gates. 

The regulations dealing with the exclusion from 
these temples of persons in inferior caste are very 
curious. Certain pariahs are not allowed even 
to approach the outermost portal. Other classes 



262 UNDER THE SUN. 

are allowed in proportion to their racial status to 
penetrate into the temple^ passing underneath the 
great gopura-crowned gateways one after another. 
One by one the less worthy castes are left behind 
until there comes a moment when the English- 
man himself is civilly told that he must no longer 
intrude.* 

In South India, it will not be denied by anyone who 
has travelled through these centres of religious life 

* This question of an Englishman's status remains, so long as we are the ruling 
caste in India, of little practical importance, but it is of interest from other points 
of view. In this particular case the Englishman appears to occupy a position 
immediately below the Brahmin caste ; but it need hardly be said that this is 
merely a local convention for the purpose of showing courtesy to the white man 
and at the same time of safeguarding the privacy of the shrine itself. Elsewhere 
in India the white man is outside caste. He is not above it, because, as has 
happened to the writer himself in Benares, his shadow passing over a tray of 
chains of marigolds will so far defile them that they may no longer be sold for 
presentation in the temple. Most emphatically he is not below it. The position 
of the Englishman is fairly well recognized, and it is illustrated by a curious story 
connected with the Durbar. The position of the Maharana of Udaipur has already 
been referred to as something quite outside all ordinary precedents. At the time 
of the Durbar of 1903 the very thorny question arose as to the relative rank, or 
rather rights, of a man like him, to whose social superiority all India as one man 
assents, and that of the Mohammedan Nizam of Hyderabad, who holds chief place 
among the native chiefs by right of a definite treaty concluded with his predecessors. 
The Maharana was approached by his Resident, who pointed out to him that we 
could not take sides in the religious disputes of India, but must obey the terms of the 
treaty which we had sworn to keep. The Maharana was in a difficult position. 
He fully saw the justice of our claim, but from his point of view it was impossible 
for him in the slightest degree to relax the everlasting claims of his race and 
faith. He made a curious suggestion. "If," said he, "the Government of 
India will place between the Nizam and myself any white man of whatsoever 
degree, I will sit in Durbar with the Nizam." This estimate of the English- 
man as a kind of non-conductor is perhaps as suggestive of the real position 
occupied by ourselves in India as could well be made. It is, at the same time, 
a curious fact that this same Maharana of Udaipur in his own palace preserves so 
strictly the traditions of his race that his wife, the Maharani, is not allowed to see, 
or to be seen even by princesses of the Imperial English House. 




BUEEtilST C 



SOUTH INDIA. 263 

that few influences in India possess the fascination of 

one of these majestic memorials of human labour 

and human devotion. Perhaps the temple at 

Madura is more impressive than others. Once 

within the great thirty-foot wall of red stone, which 

shuts in the temple on all sides, the visitor is 

allowed to wander at will through a labyrinth of 

dark halls and passages and columned chambers. 

The forbidden precincts here are of small extent, and 

he must be an unimaginative man indeed who can 

pass through the cloisters without a touch of awe. 

Outside, the strong white glare of the Indian 

noon beats down mercilessly upon the infinite 

carvings of the gopura. Strange beasts writhe and 

quarrel in red sandstone among the tangled yet 

orderly ornaments of the tapering pyramid — bosses, 

cartouches, panels, knops, billet-mouldings, courses 

of egg and lotus pattern, flame-like edgings that 

follow faithfully round the deep-cut ascending lines, 

or fail for a moment where a fluted plaque stands 

boldly out amid the complicated symmetry of its 

own wide course. For each course is repeated h^ 

that above it in a lessening scale, until the design 

changes at the very summit of the gopura. Here a 

ridge supports eight or nine gilded finials, while 

at the end, on either side of the great wedge of red 



264 UNDER THE SUN. 

stone, a fine shell-like ornament over-arches the 
symbol of the divinity there honoured. The play 
of light and shade upon a gopura is infinite. Never 
does it take on the same appearance from sunrise 
to sunset. Infinite variety is caused by the shadows 
of its deep-cut ornaments changing from minute to 
minute, and the very hues of the warm apricot 
stone, visited or abandoned by the sun from hour 
to hour, change as the lights and colours of distant 
peaks. 

Inside, there is a gloom of white pillars and a 
whispering of bats like the shaking together of a 
bunch of thin steel ribbons. Only after reflection 
back and forth does a meagre light bear in from some 
unaccountable shaft, and by it you may dimly 
observe the dark corridor in which you walk, sup- 
ported on either side by great grotesquely carved 
piers and ceiled above with twenty-foot slabs of 
stone. In just as uncertain a mystery of light and 
shade we pass through to the labyrinth of pillars 
in a side shrine half an acre in extent, where, thrust 
forward so that no chance of missing them may 
occur, figures and groups obscene and foul intrude 
themselves to ward off that curious superstition of 
all South India — the baleful influences of an English- 
man's evil eye. 




A sanctuary in Madura. 



\_Factiig page ^64. 



SOUTH INDIA. 265 

The natives pay one little attention. If they 
resent one's presence, which is doubtful, they do 
not show it, while the superior officials of the temple 
are wise enough to know that the travelling English- 
man generally leaves behind him in one way or 
another very substantial bakshish. As likely as 
not, while you are looking at some curious figure 
of a dancing goddess, or a prancing yali, you will 
find your shoulder gently rubbed, and a second 
afterwards the great mass of an elephant's trunk 
will slide down over your shoulder begging for money 
with its nervous little finger-like projection as 
eloquently as any one of the children in the town 
outside. Most of us know how difficult and tire- 
some a job it is to pick up a sixpence from a hard 
surface just after the nails have been cut, and there 
is something positively miraculous in the dexterity 
with which an elephant with his apparently clumsy 
trunk will raise from the stone floor even the smallest 
of Indian coins. 

It was a Tamil who first used the famous ex- 
pression, now paraphrased in almost every country, 
that " an arch never sleeps." Whether this be 
true or not, it is clear from all experience that an 
arch can be drugged into stability for a period of 
years long enough in all conscience for any human 



266 UNDER THE SUN. 

structure. Few persons in Egypt ever come away 
without a genuine regret that the master builders 
of olden times were either unacquainted with, or, 
if they knew of it, deliberately neglected, this 
principle. It is difficult to set bounds to the 
possibilities of architecture unfettered by modesty, 
expense, or the lack of labour, if a man like Khufu 
or Rameses XII. had but had his ideas of magni- 
ficence whetted by a knowledge of the arch. In the 
same way the vast amount of labour expended on 
even such a temple as Srirangam fails a little to 
produce the result desired because of the necessarily 
short views that always have to be taken in buildings 
which depend for the width of their aisles upon the 
longest possible beam that can be safely hewn from 
the local variety of stone. Men like Tirumala 
Nayakka realised this want of lightness and en- 
deavoured to supply it by supporting the ceilings 
of their choultris upon hundreds of slender and 
delicately carved columns. Some of the most 
beautiful effects of these South Indian temples 
are gained in this way. The thousand gradations 
of grey light that penetrate into these avenues of 
stone, deflected, reflected, obstructed, cut off, ever 
dwindling in intensity as the centre of the hall is 
reached, make a tangled chiaroscuro of Ught and 




The Processional Car, Seringapatam. 




In a South Indian Temple. 



\_Faciiig page 266. 



SOUTH INDIA. 267 

shade such as_^I think is rarely seen elsewhere. But 
on the other hand there is, in these close forests of 
stone, a haunting sense of oppression from which 
one is never wholly free. 

This is the more remarkable because, in other 
parts of Southern India, the rock-cut temples 
not only exhibit a sound appreciation of wide 
internal vistas, but seem, especially in the case of 
the chief Buddhist case at Ellora, to have under- 
stood not merely the principle of the arch, but the 
timbering necessary to support a roof-vault. This 
temple at Ellora, of which a photograph is here 
annexed, is one of the wonders of India. It dates 
from about the third century of the Christian era, 
and, as a title of honour, is called the Cave of 
Visvakarma, the same divine carpenter whose 
work we have already seen at Mandalay and Puri. 
It seems almost impossible that architects who 
here used needlessly and for sheer ornament a 
Gothic arched roof and apse should have been 
totally ignorant of what they so nearly expressed. 

There is a wave of Buddhism beginning again to 
make itself felt in India after twelve centuries, 
and the proposal has been made that these Buddhist 
caves shall be handed over to trustees on behalf 
of the many thousand Buddhist pilgrims who 



268 UNDER THE SUN. 

annually visit their sacred and historic places in 
India. 

At Ellora there is also, of course, the Kailas, 
a Hindu temple of a much later day, which appeals 
so strongly to the sense of picturesqueness possessed 
by travellers that the Buddhist caves are com- 
paratively little known. In truth, there is some 
excuse for the neglect. The whole building is 
carved out of the living rock of the hillside, outside 
as well as in, and covered with carvings, isolated 
statues, or groups. Every string course is as faith- 
fully represented as if it followed its due level of 
masonry, and only a certain weather-worn dis- 
continuity in the face of the temple wall betrays 
the fact that it has not been built in the usual 
way. It stands in a roughly-squared area round 
which rise precipices of rock culminating in a 
little flash of vivid green where the hill-side vege- 
tation hangs a bouquet into the pit, and each wall is 
honeycombed at its base with strange galleries 
and pillared ante- chambers even more strangely 
decorated. Stone elephants stand in eternal attend- 
ance. A gate-pierced barrier, as well finished as the 
temple, hides it from the outside, where, a hundred 
feet lower, the long fiat Indian plain stretches 
out interminably — flat, hot, and adequately tilled. 



SOUTH INDIA. 269 

Of all the Southern Indian temples, Rameswaram 
is best worth a visit. It lies on an island between 
India and Ceylon, famous in old days for having 
been a pier of the bridge across which Rama pursued 
Ravana, King of Ceylon, and brought Sita back 
again, now chiefly receiving attention because 
it must be a pier of a very different bridge — that 
which will join up the railway systems of Ceylon 
and India. 

One joggles across from Mandapam in a little 
steamer in company with a mixed collection of 
pilgrims — Rameswaram ranks third in holiness, 
after Benares and Puri — steering apparently to 
all points of the compass at random, but really 
following the one tortuous channel deep enough 
for the five-foot draught of our little ferry. Once 
landed at Pamban, a Pilgrim's Way takes us for 
eight miles east to Rameswaram. It is a pretty 
road. It is not a good road. Indeed, it is in some 
ways as bad a road as exists anywhere upon the 
flat, but it is very beautiful. The straight-running 
track keeps between kerbstones which in most 
places have sunk into the overgrown roadside edges. 
Overhead there is an almost continuous green 
canopy of trees, either hemmed in at their roots 
by tangled undergrowth, or spaced largely by 



270 UNDER THE SUN. 

emerald grass plots. Rest houses of quaint carved 
stone await the weary pilgrims who are to be seen 
going and coming continually wrapped in medita- 
tion, and thumb-nailing off the beads of some 
rosary of crimson-dyed kernels. 

Rameswaram is reached on the edge of the water, 
and the sand whirled up by the south-westerly 
monsoon has sadly chafed its seaward wall. Inside 
there are the vast corridors for which the temple 
is famed, a full-throated bazaar in the main aisle, 
more corridors, bathing tanks, more corridors still, 
and then the forbidden central shrine. I dare say 
there is not very much going on in these sacred 
enclosures. Elsewhere is a photograph taken, more 
by luck than management, of the inner court at 
Srirangam, whereto access is denied to all but 
Brahmins ; probably Rameswaram's central shrine 
is as uninspiring. But until some Brahmin is 
born with the gifts needed to-day for scientific re- 
search, and the willingness to use them, we shall 
never know very much of what goes on in these 
innermost sanctuaries. 

Here, on the sands beside the sea at the last 
outpost of India, the journey ends. One of these 
days I will piece together another mosaic of Indian 
towns ; to my mind there will not be less of interest 



SOUTH INDIA. 271 

because the places will be less knowii than those 
which for the most part have given their names 
to the chapters in this book. But^ for the present^ 
an end has to be made somewhere, and here let 
it be, beside the south-eastward reaching sand- 
banks, hot in the sun, up which the Httle tides of 
Palk Strait ripple transparently. Behind us is a 
monotonous drum-beating, surmounting the long 
grey wall of the temple, and overhead is the crisp 
rusthng of hard palm fronds one against another 
in the hght air. It is the last rood of India, and 
over there 3'ou can see the dark line of cocoanuts 
whiich means Cevlon. 



272 



The Later Days of Nana Sahib. 



Nana Sahib was driven out of Cawnpore by Have- 
lock on the i6th of July, 1857. He retired 
through Bithur, where, amid the busy preparations 
and precautions which his defeat had rendered 
necessary, he found time to order the slaughter 
of Mrs. Carter and her month-old infant, the 
only European left within his reach. It is to 
the lasting credit of the widow of Baji Rao, and of 
Kasi Bai, Nana's youngest wife, that they had, 
six weeks before, protected Mrs. Carter, vowing 
that they would destroy themselves if a woman 
in her condition were killed. Now, however, they 
found themselves powerless. Nana's savage deter- 
mination grew with every check he received. Bala 
Rao his younger brother weakened in adversity, 
but was swept along by the new energy of the rebel 
leader, who, realising that the English were barely 
strong enough to hold Cawnpore itself, returned, 
and, taking up his residence again at Bithur, 



THE LATER DAYS OF NANA SAHIB. 273 

actively superintended the revolt in the North- West 
Provinces. His greatest hope lay in the reinforce- 
ments from Gwalior under Tantia Topi. The latter 
seems to have been a loyal servant, but took no 
pains to conceal his contempt for the capacity 
and pluck of Nana's generals, none of whom were 
given posts of responsibility in the force of about 
twenty-five thousand well-armed men, who now 
drew in to Bithur, and awaited the command to 
recapture Cawnpore. 

The last occasion on which Nana Sahib is cer- 
tainly known to have been in the field against us 
was on the 6th of December, 1857. Cawnpore, 
during the temporary absence of Sir Colin Campbell, 
had been retaken by the rebels, and Tantia Topi 
offered battle from a well-chosen position. Sir 
Colin, however, drove him headlong, and the pursuit 
of the main body was continued for fourteen miles 
along the Kalpi road. Nana Sahib, however, 
wheeled off to the north-west, along the Grand 
Trunk road, and, halting at Bithur only long enough 
to pick up his family and servants, was able to 
distance the pursuit of General Hope Grant, who 
was delayed by the need of securing the guns 
abandoned by Nana's flying rabble at Serai Ghat, 
twenty-five miles from Cawnpore. Major Russell 

18 



274 UNDER THE SUN. 

was sent on with a small force, but, after a stern 
chase across Oude, he failed to overtake the fugi- 
tives, who just made good their escape across the 
Nepal frontier. 

So much is known. What happened afterwards 
to Nana Sahib has hitherto been the merest con- 
jecture. It was, however, reported that the 
notorious rebel died in the following year of malarial 
fever, contracted in the jungles of the " terai." As 
can be imagined. Lord Canning's government were 
not anxious to disprove the rumour. Nana's con- 
tinued existence would have been the source of 
never-ending disquiet. He would have been, till 
his death, a centre round which disaffection must 
naturally rally, and entirely as Sir Jang Bahadur 
was trusted, it was felt by everyone that Nana's 
death was by far the best solution of the diificulty. 
In the absence of definite information, the reward 
of fifty thousand rupees, which was placed upon 
his head, was not cancelled, but to the relief of 
everyone the report of his death at this date came 
to be generally credited, and was eventually 
accepted by Indian historians. It is true, how- 
ever, that from time to time a little uncertainty was 
felt, and the issue of The Times of December 28th, 
i860, contained a letter definitely stating that Nana 
Sahib was still alive and in Tibet, and that the 
rumour of his death in 1858 had been deliberately 



THE LATER DAYS OF NANA SAHIB. 2;5 

circulated for political reasons. It was also said 
that in 1859 one of Hope Grant's men actually 
offered to bring him into the camp. But years 
passed, no corroboration or further news was 
published, and the original story came to be 
accepted by all, though, in the absence of definite 
information, from time to time a rumour spread 
itself that Nana had once again been discovered 
as an old man in one part of India or another. 
It will hardly be believed, but even in January 
of this present year, 1906, a report was circulated 
that the aged criminal had again been found. 
Luckily perhaps for Nana, there was something to 
substantiate the report of his death in 1858, and 
the search for him slackened in consequence. But 
it was Bala Rao, his brother, who actually died in 
that year. 

Before going on, it is necessary to re-state some 
of the facts connected with Nana Sahib's position. 
Many people to-day may be ignorant of the 
reasons which induced the rebels of 1857 to accept 
the guidance of Nana, and even those who are 
well acquainted with the facts may be glad of 
something to remind them of the details of the 
Peshwa's pedigree. 

Nana Sahib's name was Dhandu Pant. He 
was the second son of Madho Rao Bhao Bhat, 
whose wife was the sister of the wife of Baji 

18* 



'^y^ UNDER THE SUR 

Rao, the last Peshwa of Poona. Baji Rao was 
the representative of the Mahratta claim to the 
Empire of India, and when he went into com- 
pulsory retirement, there is no doubt that he took 
with him the sympathy of a large number of Hindus, 
though his personal record was not of the best. 
The English government treated him with generosity. 
It allowed him the handsome pension of £80,000 a 
year — he was childless, and it was made clear from 
the outset that this was to be a personal annuity, 
and would not descend to anyone — and permission 
to choose his own place of residence. He chose 
Bithur, a town about thirteen miles north-north- 
west of Cawnpore. 

It is, of course, necessary for a Hindu to have 
a son — by blood or adoption — to perform neces- 
sary funeral rites, and for that reason Baji Rao, 
in his childlessness, cast about for a boy whom 
he might adopt. His choice fell upon Dhandu 
Pant, together with another who died soon after- 
wards and whose place was filled ultimately by 
Gangadhai Bhat or Bala Rao, Dhandu Pant's 
younger brother, a man of no character. 

Dhandu Pant was chosen because, by Hindu 
law — and the Bhats, though the name seems 
vulgar, were, by blood, Konkanasta Brahmins 
of the straitest sect — an eldest son may not be 
adopted. His eldest brother, Baba Bhat, was thus 



THE LATER DAYS OF NANA SAHIB. 277 

passed over and always appears in the history of the 
Mutiny as his younger brother's subordinate. He 
escaped detection in 1858, and, it is said, actually 
lived for many years in the SanjaoH bazaar near 
Simla, disguised as an ascetic. He acted as Nana's 
treasurer and was High Commissioner of Cawn- 
pore at the time of the Massacre. Dhandu adopted 
the name by which he is universally known. Nana 
Sahib, and went to live with Baji Rao at Bithur. 

The ex-Peshwa's choice of Bithur — or, as it was 
then frequently called, Brahma-wat — as the place of 
his exile, is significant. Although the Company's 
Intelligence Department seem to have forgotten 
the fact, Bithur is well known to Hindus as the 
especial place of resort of those who have a griev- 
ance. It is reputed to be the accomplisher of 
every injured man's object. Immediately after 
the transference of Baji Rao to this auspicious 
spot. Brahmins from Benares, and from the south, 
flocked hither, and mystic rites were performed 
— rites, however, which did not prevent Baji Rao 
dying in 185 1 without seeing any fruit thereof. 
Meanwhile Nana Sahib showed no unwillingness to 
make friends with the English ; he even went out 
of his way to invite parties of officers and ladies to 
Bithur. 

But the seeds of trouble were sown in 1851, 
when Nana Sahib — to take the most trustworthy 



278 UNDER THE SUN. 

evidence — was twenty-seven years old. Baji Rao, 
in his will, left property to Nana which has been 
estimated at two million pounds. But Nana 
immediately claimed in addition the continuance 
to himself of Baji Rao's huge pension. This was 
refused. The Court of Directors, as an act of 
grace, offered him the revenues of a small district, 
but this olive-branch was rejected, and AzimuUah 
Khan was despatched to London to plead his 
cause. This attempt was unsuccessful, but Nana, 
biding his time, showed little resentment, and re- 
mained on excellent terms with the garrison of 
Cawnpore. 

It is not necessary to tell again the only too 
well-known story of Cawnpore. When Nana fled 
north to Nepal, he took with him the widow of 
the late Peshwa and his own wife, Kasi Bai. This 
girl — for even then she was not fourteen years 
old — was the daughter of one Ramchandra Sak- 
haram Karmakar. She had been married for some 
years previously, but sent to Nana only in 1854, 
when she was ten. Her name was originally Sundra 
Bai, and she was known in Nana's household both as 
Kasi Bai and Krishna Bai. She was also frequently 
called Kaku Bai. This confusion of names is 
characteristic of everyone concerned. Most of the 
Nana's adherents had two names, and many even 
more, Kasi Bai and her adoptive mother-in-law, 



THE LATER DAYS OF NANA SAHIB. 279 

as has been said, had attempted to save Mrs. Carter's 
life. When, on the 6th of December, they were 
taken with Nana on his flight, they took with 
them two ladies, natives of Brahma-wat, who 
were living, and long afterwards lived, under Kasi 
Bai's protection, though their relations with Nana 
admitted of no doubt. With them also went Bala 
Rao, his brother, Tantia Topi the younger, Baba 
Godbole, Jannu Singh, and Parusram Jagmal, 
old servants of Nana's. It is probable that Tantia 
Topi the elder and his wife accompanied Nana 
on this occasion, but, if so, he must almost imme- 
diately have left Nana and made his way back to 
India. 

The story of their reception over the frontier is 
strange. They were received by Kedarnath Singh, 
a Nepalese general, who had been specially deputed 
to meet them by Sir Jang Bahadur, the Prime 
Minister. He escorted them to a small village called 
Deondari, probably identical with the Deongarh 
of the map, near Tribeni Ghat. There they awaited 
orders. It must have been an anxious moment 
for Nana. Neutrality is a product of the west, 
and the fugitives may well have encountered on the 
road some of the contingent of eight thousand that 
Nepal was sending to the help of the English at 
that time. Moreover, Jang Bahadur had an ugly 
method of dealing with emergencies. But there 



28o UNDER THE SUN. 

was no help for it. There was no safety for Nana 
in India, as he knew well enough. At last Jang 
Bahadur arrived in person. His terms were 
simple. Kasi Bai and the other women and the 
servants were to put themselves under the pro- 
tection of the Prime Minister. Nana was appa- 
rently offered no asylum, but a hint may have been 
conveyed to him that Jang Bahadur would wink 
at his escape in disguise. It seems certain that 
Nana never saw his own people again, even in 
Nepal, except in this stealthy way. The terms 
were agreed to. Nana and Tantia handed over 
their wives and offered to go westwards in the 
robe of Atits.* The dress was provided and the 
exchange made. 

At the last moment one final arrangement had 
to be made. Drawing from his pocket the famous 
" Nau-lakha," the principal jewel of the Peshwas, 
he offered to sell it to Jang Bahadur. It is — for 
it exists still — a long necklace of pearls, diamonds, 
and emeralds, and is perhaps without a rival in the 
world. It is estimated to-day — some small addi- 
tions have been made to it — to be worth one 
hundred thousand pounds. The unsympathetic 
Prime Minister saw his chance. Instead of the 
nine hundred thousand rupees, which its very 

* Atits are mendicants of the Saivite sect. They claim entertainment, and on 
the "angels unawares" principle generally obtain it. 



THE LATER DAYS OF NANA SAHIB. 281 

name proclaimed to be its real value, he offered 
ninety-three thousand — £9,300 — and Nana, com- 
pelled to take the offer or leave it, accepted the 
money. Here, however, Kasi Bai interposed. She 
would prefer, she said, not to come to Khatmandu 
and receive the price in hard cash. Would Jang 
Bahadur give her a village or two instead ? So 
the Prime Minister, conscious perhaps of having 
driven a hard bargain with the helpless, agreed, in 
return for the necklace, to farm out to her the 
revenues of Dhangara and Raharia for four thou- 
sand five hundred rupees a year, which gave her a 
margin of between six and seven thousand rupees 
a year, besides the four hundred a month which 
Jang Bahadur allowed her for her maintenance. 
Thus the shrewd little lady secured a return of 
nearly eight per cent, upon the price of the neck- 
lace.* 

Then, the two menf in their " girna-basta " 
dress took each a small " danda " in his hand, 
and went out to the west, and as he turned away 

* The Maharaja of Darbhanga owns this necklace now. It descended through 
Ranodip Singh, Jang Bahadur's son, to Maharaja Bir Shamsher, whose widow 
sold it for its full value, 900,000 rupees, to the Maharaja Deb Shamsher, then 
Prime Minister. He was expelled, and, carrying the jewels with him, sold 
them at twenty -four hours' notice to the present Maharaja of Darbhanga. Accus- 
tomed as Calcutta is to displays of gems, the sight of this necklace upon the 
Maharaja on the occasion this year of laying the foundation-stone of the Victoria 
Memorial Hall caused something of a stir, though its history was probably known 
to few. 

I As is well known, Tantia Topi was eventually caught and hanged at Sipri 
in 1859. 



282 UNDER THE SUN. 

Nana Sahib said, " I cannot live in the hills or 
in the terai. I will go to the west, to some country 
where these sahibs are not in power." So Kasi 
Bai and her small court were left, and they went 
far to the extreme east of Nepal, to Dhangara, 
a village on the Kosi, not far from the Bengal 
frontier. But before she left the neighbourhood 
of Deondari, Bala Rao, Nana's brother, sickened 
and died of malarial fever. This was in many ways 
a good thing for everyone, for it started the report 
of Nana's own death, and things were kept so secret 
that General Sidhiman Singh, governor of the 
western terai, once assured an English officer that 
he had been present at Nana Sahib's burning in the 
Bhutwal district near Deongarh. 

Life at Dhangara was not as uneventful for 
Kasi Bai as might have been expected. It may 
as well be confessed at once that she was far from 
being faithful to Nana. Jang Bahadur she could 
perhaps hardly resist, but the list of her lovers 
is much more extensive. Young Tantia Topi was 
probably the favoured one, but it seems that there 
was also some justification for the jealous feud 
between Narazon Rao — a servant of Nana's who 
was once arrested in India as Nana himself ; his 
other name was Nana Safiri — and Bulwant Rao, 
who was, by the way, young Tantia Topi's half- 
brother, Accusation and counter-acQUsation even- 



THE LATER DAYS OF NANA SAHIB. 283 
tually resulted in the expulsion of Narazon Rao 
and the imprisonment of Bulwant Rao. 

In the latter case, the actual ground of the accusa- 
tion was that Bulwant Rao had stolen jewels which 
Nana Sahib had entrusted to him to sell. As a 
matter of fact, Bulwant Rao behaved perfectly 
honestly. These jewels, to the value of 136,000 
rupees, were sold in Lahore. Jang Bahadur, how- 
ever, seized the opportunity of getting rid of a rival 
and Bulwant Rao remained for some time in prison. 
In this connection there was one of the strangest 
incidents of the whole story of Nana Sahib. Kasi 
Bai, who seems throughout to have been a good- 
hearted woman, actually approached the late Duke 
of Edinburgh during Jhis tour in Nepal with a 
request that he should ask for Bulwant Rao's 
release. What a strange picture it is ! 

Three or four years after her arrival Kasi Bai sent 
a letter to her father in India, asking him to come 
and see her. With Oriental deliberation, he does so 
in 1866, and with him goes AzimuUah Khan, Nana's 
late secretary. Now, in 1866, the behef that the 
famous rebel was dead had become universal, 
so that the worthy Sakharam was a Httle upset 
to notice that his daughter was still wearing the 
" tika," or spot of red turmeric, on the forehead, 
bangles on her wrists, and the kajur (antimony) 
adornment in her eyes. No Konkanasta widow 



284 UNDER THE SUN. 

could wear these proofs of " coverture " for a 
moment. Baji Rao's widow, who was living in 
the same house, had, of course, abjured them all. 
AzimuUah Khan,* on his return to India, also 
assured one Ganesh, a chowkidar at Cawnpore, 
that Nana was still alive, and living under the 
protection of Sir Jang Bahadur. Indeed, in Nepal 
there seems to have been little concealment of the 
fact. Servants still watched over Nana's bed, 
** puja " was still made to Nana's silver chair 
and tulsi-leaves strewn before it. Nor was this 
all. The nightly talk in the kacheri of the 
" Begam's " house at Dhangara was of the coming 
of the Russians, and the reinstatement of Nana 
upon the throne. 

One name occurs once or twice at this time. 
The residence of Nana is said to be a village called 
Thapa Teli. Thapa, or Thapu, seems to be a 
Nepalese word for a district or a village, but Teli 
is still unidentified. The only indication of its 
whereabouts is that Ririthang, which is apparently 
near to it, is said to be thirty-five days' march west- 
wards of Dhangara. If the extreme difficulty of 
travelling in Nepal is not borne in mind, it might be 
thought almost impossible to spend thirty-five days 
in moving from one part of it to another. As it is, 

* This man is believed afterwards to have made the pilgrimage to Mecca and 
died there. 



THE LATER DAYS OF NANA SAHIB. 285 

it is probably an adequate description of the distance 
from Dhangara to Ririkot — " thang " means a 
plain and therefore probably applies to some portion 
of the district — which lies in the far west on the 
main road a few miles short of Sil Garhi. Thirty 
miles west again is a hamlet called Tila-teli, which 
may be the place referred to, especially if the 
adjacent mountains are known as the Dongsalian 
range. Wherever it is, Jang Bahadur seems to 
have allowed Nana Sahib to settle there under the 
pretence of keeping a shop, and to have settled a 
small monthly allowance of a hundred or hundred 
and fifty rupees upon the unhappy man. But 
every year about the time of the Shurat Mela, which 
took place in January or February, Nana, in the 
disguise of an Atit, returned to Dhangara. On 
these occasions, Kasi Bai, in the teeth of all Brah- 
minical customs, superintended personally the dis- 
tribution of food to pilgrims, and no doubt 
managed to snatch a few minutes' conversation 
with her husband. 

In 1864 there had been a rumour among our 
troops at Diwangiri on the Assam frontier that 
Nana was present with the Tongsa Penlop and 
the Bhutanese army. In 1870, a near relative of 
the Governor of Bhutwal — where Nana is said 
to have died — testified from personal knowledge that 
he was still alive. Early in 1875 the definite news 



286 UNDER THE SUN. 

was received that he was then thirty-five days 
west of Trebeni Ghat (probably a shp), and an 
assurance was given that on March 5th he would 
come to make his annual visit to the Rani through 
Chitwan, " below Chandagiri." As a matter of 
fact, there seems to have been some delay, as the 
Atit mendicants did not arrive at Dhangara in 
that year till the latter days of April. There 
they received clothing and other presents, 
and started again westwards, a matter which 
was specially arranged by the Rani. Bulwant 
Rao seems to have been the accredited agent 
of Nana in these journeyings, and it is due to 
his activity that the Indian government received 
no more accurate information as to Nana's 
movements. 

One more extraordinary piece of evidence re- 
mains. Nana Sahib, doubtless in his disguise as 
an Atit, from time to time attended the Kumbh 
Mela at Allahabad. It is almost inconceivable that 
he should thus put his head into the noose, but he 
must have been a desperate man, not unwilling 
perhaps to be caught, and once again, at any cost, 
to become the centre of any Indian disaffection. 
If one version of his latter days be true, at the close 
of his life Nana gave up all attempt at conceal- 
ment. Be that as it may, no less a witness than 
the President of the Cow Protection Society has 



THE LATER DAYS OF NANA SAHIB. 287 

stated that so late as 1885 Nana Sahib dined with 
him on that festival. 

Here we leave the hard road of ascertainable 
fact, and there is a choice of paths. One story, 
which was told to me by a well-known Rajput 
three or four years ago, is as definite as could be 
wished. It is to the effect that Nana, when between 
sixty and seventy years of age, was somewhat 
barbarously murdered in the terai by a man named 
Pulia Pame, whose sister he had seduced some years 
before. The other story is very different and far 
more tragic. In 1895, at a place about thirty miles 
from Rajkot, an aged mendicant, who had been 
creating a disturbance in the road, was arrested. 
He said that he was Nana Sahib and claimed 
the protection of Sir Jang Bahadur, who had, 
of course, died many years before. The man 
was partially insane, and only excited merriment 
among his own countrymen. But he talked 
in his sleep of Nepal, and claimed that if he had 
his rights he would be Peshwa. Witnesses were 
collected, his bodily marks noted — apparently they 
bore out his contention to some extent* — and the 

* In appearance Nana is said to have been rather above middle height, with a 
round face, and eyes peculiarly set. He was marked with small-pox, and some 
authorities say that he had a scar on his forehead. As to less visible charac- 
teristics, he may or may not have borne traces of an operation for varicocele. 
The man detained in 1895 seemed to some extent to correspond, and had in 
addition a scar on the back, evidently caused by a lanced carbuncle. Some day 
a chance medical diary, hitherto undiscovered, may decide the matter. The 
portrait of Nana Sahib, published in The Ilhistrated London News at the time of 
the Mutiny, is said to be quite unlike him. 



288 UNDER THE SUN. 

Indian Government was consulted. Unutterably 
wise, Calcutta ordered that the witnesses should be 
dispersed and the man set free. 

If there was any truth in the story, there is 
hardly a more desolate picture in history than that 
of Nana Sahib — old, discredited, half-witted, but 
still claiming the horrible honour of being himself, 
contemptuously set free by those whom he had so 
foully injured to wander still along the roads, the 
laughing-stock of his own people, vociferating his 
claims to idle wayfarers who soon passed on to 
their own business with a smile for the homeless 
and broken old man whose brains God had filled 
with illusion. 

This is, perhaps, all we shall ever know of the 
later days of Nana Sahib. 



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